Calle de Homero

The street bears the name of the Greek poet Homer, traditionally credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey (second half of the 8th century BC, authorship debated). It opens in the Niño Jesús district, urbanised by Inmobiliaria Urbis S.A. from 1947 in a layout that gathers intellectual figures from different eras: Averroes, Amado Nervo, Ángel Ganivet, Viera y Clavijo.

The Niño Jesús district began to rise in 1947 in the southeast of the Retiro district, on land that until then held rubbish dumps and the Arganda railway station. Inmobiliaria Urbis promoted the works and the architect José Antonio Domínguez Salazar directed the layout. The first phase was built between 1947 and 1954, and the second extended the district until 1959. The calle de Homero is born on this new map and runs from Viera y Clavijo to Ángel Ganivet, within a pedestrianised set it shares with Averroes. Whoever walks it crosses several centuries of literature without realising, because the district’s street names gathered writers and thinkers of very different periods: Averroes in the 12th century, Viera y Clavijo in the 18th, Amado Nervo and Ángel Ganivet at the turn of the century. Homer heads that gallery from the very beginning of it all, in ancient Greece, as the father of epic poetry. The street is newly built and carries no earlier name.

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