Calle del Sil

El Sil owes its name to the river that gives character to the northwest of the peninsula, the main tributary of the Miño, and forms part of a river map drawn over the neighborhood: when the El Viso colony was built in the 1930s, its streets were named after Spanish rivers, and the Sil ended up beside the Nervión, the Tormes, the Arga and the Turia. The river descends from the lands of León and narrows in Galicia between rock walls that in places rise above five hundred meters, the canyons that today shape the Ribeira Sacra. There the water carved a vertical landscape of hanging monasteries and vineyards on nearly impossible terraces. The Sil also carried a treasure. The Romans knew its sands held gold and at Montefurado bored through a hill to divert the channel and sift the metal the river brought down from the mountains. The place name, “pierced hill,” still recalls that hole opened in the mountainside. Of that river of deep gorges only a quiet plaque remains in Madrid, among the Rationalist villas of El Viso.