Calle de El Soto
Takes its name from the common word soto, the damp riverside woodland that grew beside the Manzanares, a few steps from this street in Legazpi.
A soto is the low, damp grove that thrives on a riverbank, the shade of black poplars, white poplars, willows and brambles over ground the water floods and fertilizes. The word comes from the Latin saltus, forest or hill, and whole towns of the region grew from it: Soto del Real, the sotos of the Jarama and the Henares.
The calle de El Soto lies in Legazpi, in southern Arganzuela, very close to the bed of the Manzanares. Until the nineteenth century this whole strip was rural riverbank and market-garden meadow, land for floods rather than asphalt, and the name keeps the memory of that riverside growth. Barely eighty-two meters are enough to recall that here, where warehouses and buildings now line up, there was water, mud and trees leaning over the current.