Valdepiélagos
Valdepiélagos is a municipality of the Community of Madrid, Spain. It received the title of villa (town) on 3 May 1801.
The origins of the word Valdepiélagos are obscure, nevertheless linguists and historians have proposed two different versions about this name:
* Valdepiélagos comes from the transposition of val (archaic short form of valle meaning valley), preposition de (of), and piélago (from Latin pelagus, sea), which is a poetic word to name a sea or ocean or, in a figurative sense (as it seems in this case) an abundance of waters. According to this theory, the meaning of Valdepiélagos would be valley of many waters.
* Valdepiélagos was also the place chosen by the ancient residents of nearby Talamanca de Jarama for laying the skins of animals under the sun in order to dry them before they could be further worked on. Thus, the name would consist of val + de + piel (which means skin in Spanish) + lagos (lakes, again in reference to the numerous currents and waters). This explanation is consistent with the local place names in the area, with towns often being named after the trade commodity they produced.
The origins of the word Valdepiélagos are obscure, nevertheless linguists and historians have proposed two different versions about this name:
* Valdepiélagos comes from the transposition of val (archaic short form of valle meaning valley), preposition de (of), and piélago (from Latin pelagus, sea), which is a poetic word to name a sea or ocean or, in a figurative sense (as it seems in this case) an abundance of waters. According to this theory, the meaning of Valdepiélagos would be valley of many waters.
* Valdepiélagos was also the place chosen by the ancient residents of nearby Talamanca de Jarama for laying the skins of animals under the sun in order to dry them before they could be further worked on. Thus, the name would consist of val + de + piel (which means skin in Spanish) + lagos (lakes, again in reference to the numerous currents and waters). This explanation is consistent with the local place names in the area, with towns often being named after the trade commodity they produced.
Map - Valdepiélagos
Map
Country - Spain
Flag of Spain |
Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the migration of different non-Roman peoples from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centered in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as Reconquista, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually the converts were expelled through different royal decrees.
Currency / Language
ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
---|---|---|---|
EUR | Euro | € | 2 |
ISO | Language |
---|---|
EU | Basque language |
CA | Catalan language |
GL | Galician language |
OC | Occitan language |
ES | Spanish language |