Calle de Luis Camoens
The street takes its name from Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524–1580), the Portuguese poet who wrote Os Lusíadas (Lisbon, 1572). Madrid hispanicised his surname as Camoens when adapting the Portuguese velar nasal —õ— into Castilian. The current name dates from the 1958 municipal street register, unverified in a primary source.
The Calle de Luis Camoens runs through the Jerónimos neighbourhood, in the Retiro district, between the streets of Andrés Torrejón and Juan Valera. It belongs to the residential grid that sprang up in the last quarter of the 19th century, when the grounds of the Buen Retiro passed to the council, and here the street names gathered a group of writers from the Iberian world.
The name honours Luís Vaz de Camões, a poet whose very birthplace is uncertain, around 1524. His great epic, Os Lusíadas, appeared in Lisbon in 1572 and recounts the Portuguese voyages as far as the East Indies. Camões also wrote in Castilian and composed lyric verse in the manner of Petrarch. He died in Lisbon in 1580, and Philip II granted him the honorary title of Prince of the Poets of Spain.
Madrid holds another street for the same poet, the paseo de Camoens y Valero, in Moncloa-Aravaca; the old name once attributed to this street most likely arose from a confusion with that namesake.
Its names
- Camoens y ValeroAnterior a 1958 (según agregadores digitales)