Calle de Francisco Vitoria

In 1505 a young man took his vows at the Dominican convent of San Pablo in Burgos. From there he went to Paris, where he studied and earned his doctorate. That man, Francisco de Vitoria, would end up teaching in Salamanca, where in 1526 he won by examination the chair of Prime Theology, the most coveted in the kingdom. He held it for twenty years. From that chair he thought something that ran centuries ahead of his time. In his lectures De Indis (1538) and De Iure Belli (1539) he formulated the ius gentium, a natural order binding on all peoples equally, regardless of their faith or who ruled them. He held that the native peoples of America were full owners of their lands and of themselves. He died in 1546 without seeing a single line of those ideas in print, yet their echo travelled far: Hugo Grotius read and cited them. The street came much later, in the Niño Jesús district, built up around 1947 on the grounds of the old Tajuña railway station. No record survives of when this name was given.