Calle de Enrique D'Almonte

The street takes its name from Enrique d’Almonte y Muriel (1858-1917), a cartographer and geographer who mapped the Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Spanish Guinea and the Sahara. He died in the sinking of the steamer Carlos de Eizaguirre, blown up by a mine laid by the German cruiser Wolf near Cape Town on 26 May 1917.

The calle de Enrique D’Almonte recalls a cartographer who spent his life drawing the edges of the Spanish empire just as that empire was fading. He was born in 1858, and the confusion starts right there: the records say Seville, but the Royal Academy of History places him in Cádiz. The man who drew exact maps of half the world left his own birth without firm coordinates. In 1880 he sailed for the Philippines, where he worked almost eighteen years mapping Luzon and other islands. When Spain lost its Asian colonies, he turned his gaze to Africa: between 1901 and 1911 he helped fix the borders of Spanish Guinea and catalogued nearly three thousand plant species; in 1913 he mapped the Sahara in four sheets at a scale of 1:1,000,000. His end has something of a novel. On 26 May 1917 he was aboard the steamer Carlos de Eizaguirre when the ship struck a mine near Cape Town, laid by the German raider Wolf. Of the 159 people aboard, 134 died, among them the man who had known how to find his bearings on three continents.

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