Calle de Fomento

Calle de Fomento runs down from the Cuesta de Santo Domingo to calle del Río, in the Palacio quarter. Its line stitches together two urban strips that began separately, already visible on Texeira’s 1656 map: the upper stretch was called calle de Santo Domingo, after the neighbouring convent; the lower one carried more tangled names tied to the settlements built outside the walls from the late 16th century. The present name came with a building raised for the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, designed by Ventura Rodríguez in 1782. Once the Inquisition was abolished in 1820, the property passed from hand to hand until, on 11 January 1835, the Ministry of Public Works moved in, and the city gave the street the ministry’s name. At number 13, Manuel García Siches was born in 1805, a baritone and inventor of the laryngoscope, son of the tenor Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García and brother of the singers María Malibrán and Paulina Viardot. In 1855 he presented his invention to the Royal Society in London, armed with a simple dentist’s mirror.