Calle de Luis de Salazar

Luis de Salazar y Castro, a genealogist and heraldist, reconstructed the family tree of Spain’s great noble houses with a thoroughness that earned him the nickname the prince of genealogists. To write his history of the House of Lara he copied, bought and rescued thousands of medieval documents that would otherwise have been lost: royal privileges, letters and deeds. He assembled an archive so vast that it is still kept at the Royal Academy of History under his own name. Anyone tracing the origin of a Spanish lineage still ends up in the files Salazar copied. The calle de Luis de Salazar is short, barely three hundred metres in Prosperidad, a district born as a working-class suburb in the nineteenth century.