Calle de Chozas de la Sierra

The name travels from the north of the region, where a village in the sierra was called Chozas for centuries. The place name plainly recorded what was there: the humble houses, the rustic dwellings of the herding folk. Later a geographical addition was tacked on to avoid confusion with other places of the same name. The village did not wear that name well. In the mid-20th century its residents asked to change it because it invited mockery, and in 1959 Chozas de la Sierra became Soto del Real. The Madrid street kept the old place name, the one no one uses for the municipality any more. Fixed here, in a stretch of barely sixty metres in the Prosperidad neighbourhood, is the name a whole village decided to leave behind.