Calle de Vaquerías

Before the towers of the Estrella neighborhood filled these lots, there were cows here. On the northern edge of the old Beata María Ana de Jesús asylum stood several stables where cattle were raised and milked to sell fresh milk, and from them Calle de Vaquerías took its name. The urban dairy was for decades an everyday sight in Madrid. They were modest premises, in the ground floors of houses or in yards on the outskirts, with a few animals each, and neighbors came with the milk can to fill it with milk still warm. What elsewhere in the city remained an anecdote, in this corner of Retiro was written into the map. The great transformation came in July 1957, when the land was declared for urgent occupation and the developer Urbis put the lots out to tender for the large blocks. Amid so many names of stars, Vaquerías still points downward, to the ground of pasture and mud that came before it. Today the street skirts the Beata María Ana hospital, where the cattle that gave it its name once grazed.