Calle Andrés de Urdaneta
Recalls the Basque navigator and cosmographer Andrés de Urdaneta (1508-1568), the Augustinian who in 1565 charted the return route across the Pacific between Asia and America.
The name of this Legazpi street points to a navigation problem that took forty years to solve. Andrés de Urdaneta, born around 1508 in the Basque town of Ordizia, set sail very young toward the Spice Islands and came back a cosmographer, with years of hunger, scurvy and Portuguese captivity behind him.
Five expeditions had attempted the return voyage from Asia to America and all had failed: the easterly winds made it impossible to come back by the same route. Now an Augustinian friar, he agreed to accompany Miguel López de Legazpi to the Philippines. In 1565, in charge of the navigation of the ship San Pedro, he gambled on sailing north until he caught the westerly current and winds, and followed them until he sighted the coast of California.
The return route was open. For two and a half centuries the Manila Galleon repeated that course almost unchanged, until 1815. Urdaneta died in Mexico in 1568.