Calle Luis Mitjans

The Luis Mitjans keeps a name with no biography. The surname, of Catalan root, points to a real person, but there is no documented record of who that Luis Mitjans was or why this street in the Adelfas neighbourhood was dedicated to him. What is documented is the character of the neighbourhood. Adelfas grew at the south-eastern edge of the Retiro district as a working-class area of small industry, with low houses beside the railway tracks. The sector next to the tracks, around the vanished calle California, was known as Las Californias, and there stood the old tenement blocks of the late nineteenth century until the reform plan of the eighties demolished much of that housing. On the Luis Mitjans itself, a housing block for the Banco de la Construcción was built in 1935. The name recurs in a nearby municipal sports facility, without any plaque clarifying whom it names.