Travesía de la Florida

Barely sixty-five metres of dead end between calle de Mejía Lequerica and calle de Serrano Anguita, in the Justicia quarter. That is why the city’s old street registers call it an alley rather than a street. The name was borrowed from its neighbour. Teixeira’s map (1656) labelled that larger street calle de las Flores; by Espinosa’s (1769) it read calle de la Florida. Behind the shift lies a telling change: the anonymous plural of some gardens becomes the nickname of their owner, doña María de la Vega, Countess of la Florida. That same street would later be called de la Concordia and, in 1910, Mejía Lequerica. The alley appears in 1692, when the city granted Matías Clavería a lane to add to his vegetable garden. That it was opened to enlarge a private plot explains at a stroke its brevity and its dead end: it was never meant to lead anywhere, only to close.

In 1692 the City Council ceded the little street to Matías Clavería so that he could absorb it into his private garden. The way thus fell out of public use for a time, which explains why in the maps of that period it does not appear as an independent street. Peñasco de la Puente and Cambronero, in their 1889 compendium, were the ones who restored it to the official street register by pointing out that that old little street was the same one their contemporaries knew as Travesía de la Florida.