Calle Fernández de Oviedo

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was born in Madrid in 1478 and died in Santo Domingo in 1557, after crossing the Atlantic a dozen times. In 1532 the Crown named him chronicler of the Indies, a post that made him the first European to set out to catalog the nature of the New World with an observer’s eye. His Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias, printed in 1526, was one of the first texts to describe American flora and fauna in Spanish: the manatee, the armadillo, the iguana, maize, tobacco. He studied and named species when there were still no scientific methods to do so. What thrilled him most was the pineapple: he devoted whole pages to pinning down its smell, taste and texture for a reader who had never tasted it, until the description read more like praise than a catalog. The Ciudad Jardín neighborhood gathers several streets dedicated to figures tied to Madrid; this one bears the surname of the Madrilenian who taught Europe what a pineapple was.