Calle de Cavanilles Particular
It owes its name to the Valencian botanist Antonio José Cavanilles y Palop (1745-1804), director of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid from 1801 until his death. The word “Particular” marks it as a secondary street branching off the adjacent Calle de Cavanilles. The main street’s name was fixed on 21 July 1880, when the City Council standardised the spelling “Cavanilles” in place of the earlier “Cabanilles”.
The Calle de Cavanilles Particular hangs off another: the added word “Particular” marks in the street map a lesser road, of restricted access or private ownership with public use, that runs alongside a larger street. It has no name of its own, only the borrowed one of its parent, the Calle de Cavanilles, which officially received that name on 21 July 1880. Earlier the maps labelled it Cabanilles, with that b carried along by the 19th-century chroniclers.
Behind the sign stands Antonio José Cavanilles y Palop, a botanist of the Enlightenment. In 1777 he went to Paris as tutor to the sons of the Duke of Infantado, and there, alongside Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, he immersed himself in systematic botany. In 1801 he took the reins of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. He described more than 2,200 species and established around fifty new genera; among them, in 1791, the dahlia. He died in Madrid on 5 May 1804.
Anyone who looks for him today will find him in stone: an 1865 statue portrays him holding a scroll and a plant, within the Botanical Garden itself.
Its names
- CabanillesAnterior a 1880
Sources (5)
- Callejero oficial del Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Portal de datos abiertos
- Calle de Cavanilles — Wikidata (Q29051443)
- Madrid: sus viejas calles — Cavanilles (Calle de)
- Antonio José de Cavanilles — Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
- Cavanilles — Estatua. Patrimonio cultural y paisaje urbano, Ayuntamiento de Madrid