Calle de Pinilla del Valle

The calle de Pinilla del Valle carries into the grid of Prosperidad the name of a small village in northern Madrid, reclining in the Lozoya valley among the slopes of the Guadarrama. Barely two hundred people live there today, where by the mid-eighteenth century there was already a church with a tower and a flour mill. The place name is disputed. One explanation ties it to the pines of the spot; another, more widely accepted, derives it from the pinillo, a plant with sticky yellow flowers that smells much like pine. Beneath it lies the Latin pinna, “crag”, in its diminutive form. What has made Pinilla del Valle famous was not in plain sight. Beside the reservoir, at the Calvero de la Higuera, the so-called Valley of the Neanderthals has been excavated since 1979: a cluster of Upper Pleistocene sites that has yielded bones, Mousterian tools and human remains, among them the jaw and teeth of a Neanderthal girl.