Pasaje Lince

The Pasaje Lince looks to the sky, like almost everything in this neighbourhood. When the insurance company La Estrella developed these grounds from the fifties on, its streets took names from the heavens. The lynx joins that roll not as an animal, but as a constellation. It was introduced by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in the late seventeenth century, in a poor and nearly empty region between the Great Bear and Auriga, where scarcely a noticeable star shines. The name was almost a joke: to make out its faint stars, he said, you needed the eyes of a lynx. The passage, short and quiet, honours the modesty of its constellation. Anyone walking the neighbourhood can read the sky from the pavement, hopping from the Pasaje Lince to the Calle de la Lira, from the Plaza de los Astros to the Calle de la Estrella Polar.