Travesía del Plomo

Lead gives its name to this short side street as one more link in a whole neighbourhood named after metals. Around it run Hierro, Zinc, Cobre, Cromo, Bronce and Antracita, so much so that the area is known as the barrio de los Metales, boxed in between the paseo de las Delicias, the calle de Méndez Álvaro and the paseo de la Chopera. The choice was no accident. When Madrid drew up its expansion from 1860, this south-eastern corner was set aside for industry. The Delicias station, from 1880, fixed the character of the place, and by the early twentieth-century maps the grid of streets named after materials already appears. Little trace remains of those factories; the Hauser y Menet printworks, famous for its postcards, fell to a demolition blast in 1996. Today lead survives only engraved on a plaque, over a stretch of just over seventy metres joining two streets of the same metal.