Plaza de Burdeos

In 1888, the businessman Mariano Santos Pinela and the architect Julián Marín began to build the Madrid Moderno development on land east of the Ensanche. They were selling more than houses: they advertised it as “the most European neighbourhood in Madrid.” The promise took shape in around a hundred townhouses for the middle classes. To reinforce the continental air, the streets took the names of European cities. Calle de Londres already appears labelled that way in photographs from 1912, and Calle de Roma marks the edge of the original core. Around the same perimeter lie Calle de Bremen, Avenida de Bruselas, Plaza de Boston and this Plaza de Burdeos. No document survives of the square’s naming: neither the decree that fixed it nor the year of the plaque has been found. For anyone who assumes it celebrates a friendship between cities, one note: the Madrid-Bordeaux twinning was signed in 1984, long after the square already bore its name.