Calle de Los Pajaritos

A short street, barely 272 metres, carries a name with the ring of the countryside: los pajaritos, the little birds. The diminutive fits a corner of the Adelfas neighbourhood where vegetable plots and plants still survive between the railway tracks and the M-30, but the exact reason for this calle de Los Pajaritos is undocumented. It should not be confused with its namesake in the Salamanca district. There stood another calle de los Pajaritos, later renamed calle de Ayala after the playwright Adelardo López de Ayala. About that one the old chroniclers argued over the origin: some tied it to the hunters' path; others to a stream that drained towards the lower Abroñigal. That story belongs to the north of the city, not to this southern stretch. In Adelfas, the place name keeps quiet. What remains is the diminutive and, amid the murmur of traffic, the odd sparrow that matches the sign.