Calle Puerto de la Cruz Verde

The name comes down from the range. High in the Guadarrama, at 1,256 meters, opens the Cruz Verde pass, a saddle separating San Lorenzo de El Escorial from Robledo de Chavela, flanked by Las Machotas and the San Benito hill. This Legazpi calle bears its name, like so many others in the neighborhood named after mountain passes. Some of the stone that built the monastery of El Escorial came from that pass’s quarries, so the saddle worked, in its way, on one of the crown’s greatest projects. The pass also carries a legend still told by those who cross it at night: the Lady of Cruz Verde, a woman killed in a crash on those curves, who hitchhikes with drivers and vanishes from the seat before reaching the bottom. Today the real pass is a Sunday meeting point for motorcyclists and cyclists. The street that remembers it in Legazpi stays quiet, far from the curves that lent it the name.