Travesía Hermanos Tercero
No documentary record survives of whom the surname Tercero refers to, nor of why it was chosen for this short side street.
Barely fifty-seven metres of asphalt in the Nueva España neighbourhood, within the Chamartín district. The Travesía Hermanos Tercero belongs to that residential northern Madrid that rose over old estates and orchards through the twentieth century, as the city climbed towards the Castellana.
The name points to some brothers with the surname Tercero. Who they were and what merits carried their memory to a street sign is not recorded in the available documentation. The word “tercero” misleads the ear: here it works as a surname, not as a number in a sequence.
The surrounding neighbourhood was named Nueva España, the old name of the American viceroyalty, and so many of its nearby streets evoke geographies across the Atlantic, from the calle de Costa Rica to the plaza del Cuzco. Amid so much overseas resonance, this passage keeps a surname with no biography attached.