Travesía de la Parada

In the Universidad neighborhood, a short street stands out for its stairway: Travesía de la Parada, which joins San Bernardo with calle del Álamo. Its name comes from water. Here stood a dam that pooled a stream to drive a flour mill, on the very plot where the Los Mostenses market would later rise. “Parada” was the weir that checked the current and stored it before releasing it toward the mill: technical vocabulary of the water channels that supplied 16th- and 17th-century Madrid. Earlier it was called Enhoramala vayas (roughly “to blazes with you”), and it wasn’t alone. It formed a trio with Aunque os pese (“whether you like it or not”) and Sal si puedes (“get out if you can”), three names born of the same dispute among the owners who bought some land and quarreled over the dam and the mill. Guzmán wanted to tear it down; the other two answered “enhoramala vayas”, he retorted “aunque os pese”, and when he spent the night inside the enclosure they set it alight shouting “sal si puedes”. Of those three, two were erased from the map. Only Travesía de la Parada keeps its original body, with the stairway intact, the sole physical witness of a fight over a mill that left three insults written into the street map.