Calle de Valdelasierra
A Castilian place name of the “Val de” type, literally “valley of the sierra,” with no record of which specific place it referred to when the street was named.
Valdelasierra belongs to a family of names widespread across the Castilian meseta, that of place names beginning with val, a contraction of valle (valley): Valdearenas, Valdezarza, Valdelcubo, and many others. Broken down, the name reads val de la sierra, the valley of the sierra: a fold of land at the foot of the mountains, of the kind that abound in the provinces around Madrid.
The exact reason for the sign is not recorded. It is undocumented which Valdelasierra the city council meant to invoke when naming this street in the Las Acacias neighborhood, or whether it was thinking of a village, a spot, or a name with a rural flavor.
The street does have a clear urban biography. It runs through a part of Arganzuela that for decades was warehouses, tracks, and industrial land, pressed against the railway. In the 1990s the Green Railway Corridor project buried the lines and raised housing where warehouses had stood. The Calle de Valdelasierra is today a residential street of little more than two hundred meters, near the Manzanares.