Calle Fray Luis de León

The street has carried a poet’s name since 1881: Fray Luis de León, an Augustinian, professor at Salamanca and one of the great pens of the Golden Age. The Inquisition jailed him for over four years in Valladolid, accused of placing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament above the Latin Vulgate and of translating the Song of Songs. The story goes that, on recovering his chair in 1576, he resumed his lecture with a “as we were saying yesterday,” as if those prison years had never happened. From his hand came the ode Vida retirada, which celebrates a life apart from worldly noise, among the garden, the spring and the hills. The street itself had humble beginnings. In the late nineteenth century it was barely laid out between the Ronda de Atocha and the Paseo de Santa María de la Cabeza, and its first buildings were timber warehouses, true to the industrial character planned for the whole neighborhood.