Calle de Núñez de Balboa

The street takes its name from Vasco Núñez de Balboa (Jerez de los Caballeros, c. 1475 – Acla, Panama, 1519), the Extremaduran conquistador who in September 1513 became the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean from American soil. The street opened in Madrid’s eastern Ensanche, laid out by the Castro Plan and promoted by the Marquis of Salamanca from 1863.

Calle de Núñez de Balboa runs north to south between Calle de Alcalá and Calle de Pedro de Valdivia, in the Castellana neighbourhood. It belongs to the grid of the eastern Ensanche, launched by a Royal Decree of 1860 and begun by the banker José de Salamanca in 1863. In naming that new layout, the gazetteer drew on soldiers, aristocrats and conquistadors, and this street was given an explorer. Vasco Núñez de Balboa sailed to the New World around 1500 and in 1510 founded Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first Spanish settlement to take permanent root on the American mainland. Three years later he pulled off the feat that made him famous: on 25 September 1513 he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, climbed a peak and sighted for the first time the ocean he called the South Sea. The adventure ended badly: in 1519 he was executed at Acla, a victim of his struggle with governor Pedrarias Dávila. No earlier name appears for this street, so Balboa was its first and only holder.

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