Calle Pedriza
A pedriza is a stretch of ground covered in loose stones, a word derived from “piedra” (stone) that in Madrid evokes the famous granite Pedriza of the Sierra de Guadarrama.
The name describes a landscape rather than a person. A pedriza is stony ground, a soil where rock surfaces and piles up loose; the word comes from piedra (stone) with a suffix that marks a place. Its most recognizable echo in the region lies thirty kilometers away: La Pedriza de Manzanares el Real, a granite massif of more than three thousand hectares in the Sierra de Guadarrama, where erosion carved crags with their own names, like the Yelmo or the Pájaro.
Why this word was chosen for a street in Prosperidad is not documented. The neighborhood was born around 1862 on dry farmland northeast of Madrid, dotted with roadside taverns. In that landscape of threshing floors and paths, place-names of hills and rock fit effortlessly, though no record survives of which hill or which stony patch inspired whoever named it.
What remains is the bare word, nearly out of everyday use, holding in a hundred meters of asphalt the memory of a stony ground.