Calle Valdemorillo

The name travels from the western side of the Guadarrama mountains to this corner of Legazpi. Valdemorillo is a town in the west of the Madrid region, in the Guadarrama basin, and the street belongs to a group in the neighbourhood named after villages of the region. The name appears early: around 1302 it is already cited as Val del Moriello, and soon after it figures among the hunting grounds in Alfonso XI’s Libro de la Montería. Two readings coexist over its meaning: one takes “valley of the morillo” as a reference to an old Muslim chieftain; the other sees it as a diminutive of Valdemoro. The origin is not documented with certainty. The town was known for its clay. Local clays fed a pottery tradition and, from 1845, a ceramics factory that sustained the local economy for decades.