Calle Malagosto

Malagosto takes the name of a pass in the Sierra de Guadarrama, at 1,928 meters, that separates the provinces of Madrid and Segovia. Muleteers, shepherds, and drovers crossed there when the road from the Lozoya valley toward Segovia ran over those treeless heights, exposed to wind and snow. The pass owes much of its fame to literature. Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, mentions it in the Libro de Buen Amor, where he sets the encounter with a fierce mountain woman nicknamed La Chata, who charged a toll to anyone who wanted to cross. That fourteenth-century passage also gives its other name, Malangosto. Since 1969 the people of Sotosalbos, on the far side of the range, reenact the episode each summer. The street measures barely seventy meters in the Ciudad Jardín estate, in Chamartín.