Welcome to La Alma Lincoln Park, Denver’s Oldest Residential Neighborhood

Denver has a soul.

It inhabits the trapezoid space that stretches from Colfax Avenue below the Auraria campus all the way to Sixth Avenue, over to Speer Boulevard and along the South Platte River.

Welcome to La Alma. Or should that be El Alma? Alma, which means “soul” in Spanish, is a masculine word. But in Denver, the neighborhood became known as La Alma.

“This has been brought up a lot, that it really should be called El Alma,” says Lucha Martinez de Luna, the daughter of prolific muralist Emanuel Martinez and founder of the Chicano/a/x Community Murals of Colorado project, which works to preserve this state’s murals and its Chicano heritage. “But I think it’s interesting that the community decided to keep it La Alma, because it speaks to something more profound.”

It speaks to the…