Travesía de San Mateo

Travesía de San Mateo runs diagonally between Calle de San Mateo and Calle de Pelayo, crossing Hortaleza. Its course already appears on Texeira’s 1656 map, though it then carried not one name but two. The stretch from Hortaleza toward San Mateo appeared as Travesía de Santa María la Vieja; the stretch dropping down to Pelayo went by Calle de los Panaderos, a memory of the trade that filled that block. In 1835, when the council reorganised the town’s street names, the two stretches merged under a single sign, borrowed from the larger street it feeds into. The lane boasts no great buildings. Its merit is another: weaving the web of secondary passages between Fuencarral and Hortaleza, those streets Mesonero Romanos dismissed as having nothing worth mention, without that stripping them of their worth in serving the neighbour’s daily passage.

The 1835 Nomenclátor wiped out with a single stroke two place names of different lineage, the devotional (Santa María la Vieja) and the guild-related (Panaderos), to give a single name to one road. What the street map treated as an administrative simplification was also the silent disappearance of two layers of urban memory that Teixeira’s map had fixed nearly two centuries earlier.