Calle Gómez Ortega

The name recalls Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1741-1818), botanist, physician and pharmacist. In 1772 he won the first chair of the Royal Botanical Garden and directed it for almost three decades, the institution’s most brilliant. He oversaw the decisive move: in 1781 the garden left the orchard of Migas Calientes and settled on the Paseo del Prado, beside the observatory Charles III was raising. From there he wove a continental scientific network: he coordinated the expeditions to Spanish America, controlled the cinchona trade and tried cinnamon crops in the Philippines, so that seeds from half the world reached his Madrid flowerbeds. Calle Gómez Ortega belongs to El Viso, the neighbourhood the Compañía Urbanizadora Metropolitana raised as a garden city in the 1920s and 1930s.