Calle del Poeta Esteban de Villegas

When the Jerónimos district began to be built up around 1865, on land of the former Royal Site of the Buen Retiro that the State had sold, this street first bore another name: calle del General Echagüe, after Rafael Echagüe, a soldier who served as aide-de-camp to O’Donnell. Later it took the name of the poet it keeps today, between calle de Julián Gayarre and the avenida de Menéndez Pelayo. Esteban Manuel de Villegas studied Law at Salamanca, though he never practiced: he preferred to live off the family income in Nájera, devoted to poetry. From that retired life came the Eróticas o Amatorias, printed in 1618: a volume with room for odes, versions of Horace, Anacreontics, elegies, sonnets and even Sapphic stanzas. His learning ended up costing him serious trouble. In 1659 the Inquisition of Navarre prosecuted him because, in the library of the monastery of Santa María la Real de Nájera, he defended a passage of St. Anselm on free will. The sentence imposed on him an abjuration de levi and four years of exile. The poet echoed long after his death: Meléndez Valdés, Cadalso and Iglesias de la Casa drew directly on his cantilenas, imitating him in the middle of the 18th century.