Travesía María Juana
A short travesía in the Berruguete neighborhood named after a woman whose referent has not been preserved.
On the edge of Berruguete, where Tetuán stopped being city and the fields of Chamartín began, this passage of barely sixty-five meters survives. The Travesía María Juana belongs to a handful of narrow lanes that keep women’s first names —the calle de María Zayas starts a step away—, laid out when the neighborhood was still a checkerboard of market gardens, dairies and low houses at the edge of the Bravo Murillo tollgate.
Why this corner bears the name María Juana has not been preserved. One can only guess at some owner or resident of the plots built up here between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Tetuán turned from orchards into a working-class quarter.
The travesía holds behind it neither a date nor a known episode. What remains is the name, inherited from the popular street map of a Madrid that grew in fits and starts along its outskirts.