Calle de Cotos
It takes its name from the Puerto de Cotos, the pass in the Sierra de Guadarrama whose boundary markers—the cotos—set the edge of the royal woodland of Valsaín.
This street in the Ciudad Jardín neighborhood looks toward the mountains. Its name evokes the Puerto de Cotos, the high pass in the Sierra de Guadarrama that separates the provinces of Madrid and Segovia, beside the Peñalara massif.
The toponym comes from a set of stones. In 1761 Charles III brought the woodlands of Valsaín into the Crown, and to mark off the royal forest from the lands of the El Paular charterhouse, several boundary markers were placed at the pass—the cotos that gave the place its name. On this same saddle stood the Valcotos ski resort, dismantled at the end of the twentieth century to return the ground to the mountain.