Pasaje de Pradillo

The Pasaje de Pradillo is a short branch of the adjoining calle de Pradillo, from which it takes its name. The street, in turn, received it from a former owner surnamed Pradillo, whose plots served to extend the old Prosperidad quarter northward, at the edge where the houses gave way to open country. Before it was built up, this strip of northern Prosperidad kept the air of Madrid’s early-20th-century outskirts: vegetable gardens, small livestock holdings, and summer villas with gardens. The opening of the streets over Pradillo’s land gradually fixed the layout. Growth was slow, and only in 1972, with the opening of the great avenue that crosses the area, was Pradillo fully absorbed into Chamartín, the gardens and villas already erased beneath the buildings that now line the alley.