Calle Lozoyuela
The street takes its name from Lozoyuela, a town in the Sierra Norte of Madrid merged in 1973 with Las Navas de Buitrago and Sieteiglesias (Decree 762/1973). The place name is a Castilian diminutive of Lozoya formed with the suffix -uela; the legend of founders fleeing feudal taxes has no documentary backing.
When La Guindalera began to be developed in the late nineteenth century, the City Council named its new streets after places in the mountains and the province. That is how a town sixty-six kilometres away, perched at 1,028 metres in the Lozoya Valley, reached this northeastern neighbourhood: Lozoyuela.
The town belonged for centuries to the Tierra de Buitrago, a Mendoza domain. It survived as an independent municipality until 1973, when a decree joined it to Las Navas de Buitrago and Sieteiglesias. The name is a diminutive of Lozoya, and it appears in a famous verse: the Marqués de Santillana named it in Serranilla III, “Illana, la serrana de Lozoyuela,” written in the mid-fifteenth century.
This street should not be confused with Calle del Lozoya in Chamberí, which recalls the river and not the town. Of Calle Lozoyuela, by contrast, there is no trace in the old chroniclers of Madrid’s streets, a sign that no one named it before the last third of the nineteenth century.
Sources (6)
- BOE — Decreto 762/1973, de 29 de marzo, fusión de Lozoyuela, Sieteiglesias y Las Navas de Buitrago
- Mancomunidad Valle del Lozoya — Etimología del nombre Lozoya
- Lozoya (Madrid) — Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
- Historia | Historia y Tradiciones Lozoyuela Navas Sieteiglesias
- Calle del Lozoya — Wikipedia (desambiguación del referente fluvial)
- Serranilla III: Illana, la serrana de Lozoyuela — Ciudad Seva