Calle Valeria

The name comes from the sky, not from a person. In the Adelfas neighborhood, a run of streets opened in the twentieth century was named after asteroids, those small bodies that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Calle de Valeria belongs to that series and recalls asteroid 611 Valeria. It was discovered by the American astronomer Joel Hastings Metcalf in 1906, from Massachusetts. A Unitarian minister who liked to build his own telescopes, with them he caught dozens of minor planets. The name seems to come from the provisional designation the body received when found, 1906 VL; beyond that play of letters, no record survives of whom it referred to. The street is short, barely a hundred meters at the southeastern edge of Retiro. Whoever walks it treads the name of a rock several dozen kilometers across that keeps circling the Sun every five years or so, oblivious to the plaque honoring it on the ground of Madrid.