Plaza de Basilea
The square is named after Basel (Basilea), the Swiss city on the Rhine. The place name answers to an urban decision: when CIOHSA developed the Parque de las Avenidas neighbourhood in the Guindalera from 1956, the architects named the streets after European cities beginning with B.
In the early twentieth century, the Guindalera was already a residential neighbourhood, but its densification came later. On 30 July 1956 the developer CIOHSA obtained permission to build the Parque de las Avenidas, some 40 hectares signed by architects Francisco Echenique Gómez and Luis Calvo Huedo, with blocks shaped like H, U or T that rose between 1957 and 1958.
Here emerges the curiosity an attentive walker discovers wandering the streets: nearly every road in the scheme bears the name of a European city beginning with B. Berna, Bonn, Bolonia, Burdeos, Berlín, Biarritz and, as its backbone, the Avenida de Bruselas. The Plaza de Basilea entered that list for the same reason as the rest: the initial. There was no twinning or diplomatic tribute; only the letter that ordered the whole neighbourhood like an urban alphabet.
The Swiss name, however, carries far more history than its B. It first appears written as Basilia in a text of the year 374, and the most repeated etymology links it to the Greek basileus, “king”.