Calle de Feijoo

The street recalls Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk and essayist who fought the superstitions and common errors of his time.

Since 1860 this Trafalgar street has borne the name of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, the monk who devoted his work to freeing his contemporaries from the errors they took for truths. He was born in a village in Orense in 1676, took the Benedictine habit early, and taught theology in Oviedo, where he spent nearly his whole life until his death in 1764. There he wrote the Teatro crítico universal, a vast series of essays on every kind of subject: medicine, physics, astronomy, languages, doubtful miracles. He sought to separate proven fact from inherited belief, and for it he used the essay, a genre then little cultivated in Spanish. He distrusted quack remedies, prophecies and the wonders the common people held as certain, and examined them with a scholar’s eye. The street runs briefly between Bravo Murillo and General Álvarez de Castro.