Calle Sierra

Calle Sierra takes its name from nature: a sierra is a mountain range with a jagged outline. The word comes from the Latin serra, the toothed tool, because the ridges cut against the sky recall the edge of a saw. The name evokes the peaks, not a person or an event. Which range it points to, the street register does not say. Madrid looks northwest towards the Guadarrama, the granite barrier that closes the city’s horizon and that in winter turns white in full view of anyone who lifts their eyes from Chamberí. Whoever named this street may have had that nearby range in mind, or the very idea of the mountains. The street is one of the small ones, in the upper part of Vallehermoso, a district built up when Madrid began to lay streets towards the north in the early 20th century.