Calle Las Matas

Berruguete named many of its streets after places around Madrid, and this one took Las Matas, the settlement that grew beside the railway line in Las Rozas. The name is older than the railway: on 18th-century maps, the hills between Las Rozas and Torrelodones appear as Matas Altas, and the name came from that scrubby woodland. The word mata meant low woodland, the thick brush that covered those hills. When the road from Madrid to San Ildefonso through Las Rozas and Torrelodones was improved in the 18th century, the name of the spot stuck, and in the 19th the train station fixed it for the hamlet around it. The street runs briefly between Villaamil and the neighbourhood’s main roads, far now from those scrubland heights that once lent it the name.