Calle de Viera y Clavijo

José de Viera y Clavijo came into the world on 28 December 1731 in Los Realejos, Tenerife. He studied with the Dominicans of La Orotava and served as parish priest at the church of Los Remedios, in La Laguna, between 1757 and 1770. That last year he left the islands to settle in Madrid as tutor to the eldest son of the Marquis of Santa Cruz. The post kept him at court until 1784 and opened Europe to him: he traveled through France, Flanders, Italy, Vienna and Germany. In Paris he studied chemistry at the Jardin des Plantes; in Vienna he watched Johann Ingenhousz prove that plants exchange oxygen. In those years he joined the Royal Academy of History. His great work came off the Madrid presses between 1772 and 1783: four volumes of the Noticias de la Historia General de las Islas Canarias, the first ordered history of the archipelago. In 1784 he returned to Gran Canaria as archdeacon of Fuerteventura, founded the Colegio San Marcial and directed the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Las Palmas. He died on 21 February 1813. His street lies in the Niño Jesús district, built from the 1940s onward on the former grounds of the Tajuña railway.