Calle Andrés Bello

Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López (Caracas, 1781 – Santiago de Chile, 1865), a humanist, poet, jurist and philologist, is the Spanish American intellectual figure of greatest reach in the nineteenth century. He drafted the Chilean Civil Code (1855), published the Grammar of the Spanish Language (1847) and was the first rector of the University of Chile (1843-1865).

Andrés Bello was born in Caracas in 1781 and, before turning thirty, had tutored a pupil who would change the continent: Simón Bolívar. In 1810 he crossed the Atlantic with the first Venezuelan diplomatic mission and stayed in London for almost twenty years, where he founded journals and premiered his American poetry. From 1829 he made Chile his second homeland: he was a senator, drafted the Chilean Civil Code and in 1847 published a Grammar of the Spanish Language written for Spanish Americans, which earned him honorary membership of the Royal Spanish Academy. He died in Santiago in 1865. The calle Andrés Bello is in the Colonia Iturbe, a development designed by Enrique Pfitz in 1925 and opened in May 1926. Its streets form a small gallery of intellectuals and artists, with names as varied as León Bonnat, Daniel Zuloaga or Enrique d’Almonte. Anyone looking for the man in stone can head to the Dehesa de la Villa, where a statue raised in 1972 at the urging of the Venezuelan ambassador awaits.

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