A walk through San Isidro's "pueblo"

The San Isidro district of Carabanchel is a mixture of old and new -- with a surprisingly small-town feel

Today was a chance for me to play photographer, and take lots of pictures of the neighborhood.  Be warned.  Many of them appear in this entry.

The panoramic view looking north across the valley of the Manzanares, from the Calle Zaida.  In the distance you can see the "leaning towers" of the Plaza de Castilla, and the "Four Towers" above Chamartín, at the other end of the city.  In the foreground are the more modest homes of Carabanchel.

Since today was Sunday, I took the opportunity to sleep late, do laundry, catch up on emails (some work related) and to explore the website of the Biblioteca Nacional Española, prepatory to going there.

Then I decided to go for a walk with my real camera, not just my phone.  These streets are worth proper pictures.



I first got lost in the little network of streets south of the Parque San Isidro this summer, when I was looking for an apartment, and it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit (or 40 C).  Even when walking under the beating sun was a challenge, I was struck by how silent and antique these little streets seemed, and how unknown they were, even to my Madrid friends who have lived relatively nearby for four decades.  "Parece un pueblo," one of them said at the time.  And the streets, all picturesquely named for Hispania's sixth century Visigothic kings(!) do indeed seem more like a sleepy small town than an urban neighborhood.  With their palm foliage, they also seem very beautiful and almost tropical, so it was weird to walk there again on an almost autumnal day, and find the sun as brilliant, the palms as palm-like, but the air distinctly cooler.


The streets immediately around my apartment are a mixture of old and new, with new predominating, and here and there a sign of the older houses that must have stood here, I would guess until the 1960s.

 As you can see in the pictures, the newer houses mostly are apartment buildings, with brick facades, balconies (either enclosed or unenclosed, but almost always in active use) and flat roofs (sometimes with roof decks).

The older houses are mostly single story, probably originally single-family houses, with slanting tile roofs (where their roofs remain) and white-washed sides.

I've no idea whether some of the little humble older houses that survive here and there date from before the Spanish Civil War, though I'd love to know.  An unscientific look says that they don't look far different from some of the houses photographed by Robert Capa (though the surviving ones have obviously been repaired, and in some cases possibly had retrofitting with plumbing and electricity upgrades), so they could theoretically have survived being almost literally at the Madrid front for two and a half years.  On the other hand, this was the front, and since it was both official policy and the only practical option to try to replace what had been destroyed with similar buildings, they could also be post-war imitations of lost pre-war buildings.  In any event, I would say that they couldn't be must later than the 1940s, and possibly earlier.  The new buildings range from I would guess the 1970s to roughly the present.

But this higgledy-piggledy patchwork of houses all goes away once you get to the pueblo.

Here the houses are all rows of the same type.  I don't know their dates or their story, but they're incredibly picturesque.  It strikes me that they resemble the old "workers houses" I've seen in Flanders a bit, except that Flemish cottages are white-washed and these are yellow and red tinted.

The shuttered windows give these streets an air of dignified reserve and privacy, which seems quite different from the exuberant street life that people associate with Madrid.  Even the upper windows are generally shuttered, and the lower ones have bars on them, usually with plants of some kind (cacti or evergreens, or begonias or other flowers) perched between the iron rejas and the shutters as a kind of apologetic gesture to suggest that it's not that the owners want to be unfriendly or unaesthetic, just that they value their privacy.

Most of the pueblo are row houses along the street, but a few of the fancier houses are free-standing and have walls blocking their gardens off from the street, except for the luxuriant vegetation that once again seems to apologetically suggest that the owners aren't anti-social, just reserved.  These are the houses that look most like Andalucía, and by extension most like the Caribbean.

The photos can give details of how the pueblo looks, but they can't really capture the absolute quiet, where you can hear footsteps, or silverware rattling while people wash dishes when the window is open, or laughter from an upstairs window.  Such quiet seems to belong to this kind of architecture (though certainly not in the Caribbean!!!), but it stays even in the more recent and larger housing developments, like the one around the Plaza Roger de Flor, just one street away from the pueblo.  This is a much newer, much bigger development, but it retains the same fundamental concern for a pleasant environment which keeps it quite pretty.

  As I was taking pictures of the sweet tile detail of various artesans that runs along the building in a decorative strip, I heard a little voice say with interest, "está haciendo fotos de la guardería," and looked up to find a small child on one of the balconies looking down at me with interest from one of the balconies on the third floor.  I had not in fact noticed, but one corner of the complex does house an escuela infantil, and obviously the small child had drawn the conclusion that I was taking pictures of what (from its point of view) was the most important part of the complex.





The point is, it was quiet enough to hear a small child, who wasn't particularly shouting.

I wonder if there are concerts in the little bandstand in the center of the plaza on summer evenings.  It would be a nice place to hold a milonga, nearly as picturesque as the more famous templete of similar architecture in the Retiro, and much quieter, albeit much less centrally located.

 

This is just a long-winded (and multi-pixeled) way of saying and showing that my neighborhood is pretty.  I wish I knew more of its actual history, although I can make pretty good educated guesses based on what I know more generally about Madrid.  But the San Isidro district of Carabanchel (not to be confused with Carabanchel Alto or Vista Alegre or the other equally interesting quarters I haven't yet explored in detail), has it's own special charm (though it will be nice when the Centro Cultural finishes its renovation and moves back into its own pretty brick building out of the somewhat monstrosity-like social services center on the Calle de Zaida).