Calle de Eugenio Salazar

Eugenio de Salazar y Alarcón was born in Madrid around 1530. Trained in law, he built from there a career that carried him across the Atlantic: he served as a judge in Santo Domingo, a prosecutor in Guatemala, and finally in Mexico as prosecutor and then judge of the Audiencia, where he lived for more than two decades before returning to Spain. His mark endures through his pen. He gathered nearly all his work in a manuscript, the Silva de poesía, with sonnets and songs in the Italianate taste of the late 16th century, though it barely circulated at the time. Better known are his five prose Cartas, written with a festive humor rare in the solemnity of the age: a Golden Age man of letters willing to laugh at himself. The street runs through the Ciudad Jardín neighborhood, laid out in the early decades of the 20th century as an experiment in garden-city living, with rows of low houses. A poet who spent much of his life in the Indies lends his name to a quiet street of small villas and gardens.