Calle de Jorge Juan

Calle de Jorge Juan was born with the Ensanche de Salamanca, approved on 19 July 1860 and driven by the Marquis of Salamanca. The City Council chose to honour Jorge Juan y Santacilia, who directed Madrid’s Royal Seminary of Nobles from 1770 until his death in 1773. That tie to the city weighed on the choice. Born in Novelda (Alicante) in 1713, his great adventure was the geodesic expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, between 1735 and 1744, on which he travelled with Antonio de Ulloa to measure a meridian arc over the equator and test whether the Earth was flattened at the poles. In 1753 he built, with Louis Godin, Spain’s first astronomical observatory, in Cádiz. The street lost a section in 2015, when the governing board split off the stretch between plaza de Colón and calle de Serrano and named it calle de la Armada Española.

Jorge Juan declared himself “a native of Monforte” in his admission letter to the Order of Malta, because he had been baptized there, although he was born on the El Fondonet estate, in the municipal district of Novelda. The reason was strategic: the younger sons of the Juan family baptized in Monforte gained the right to aspire to ecclesiastical dignities at the Collegiate Church of San Nicolás in Alicante. The Municipal Archive of Novelda located the document attesting to his birth within its district, reviving the dispute between the two municipalities on the occasion of the tercentenary (2013).