Calle Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada

A short street in the Universidad district, barely 75 meters between the Gran Vía and Calle del Desengaño. It began as a side street of the second stretch of the Gran Vía and was first called Calle de Hilario Peñasco. The city renamed it in 1933, the same year the Madrid-París department store went bankrupt; its eight-story colossus closes the block and today houses a Primark. From its top floor Unión Radio, seed of the SER network, broadcast the proclamation of the Second Republic. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (1509–1579) was an unusual conquistador: a lawyer before a soldier. He went up the Magdalena from Santa Marta with some 800 men, of whom barely 175 reached the highlands alive, and on 6 August 1538 he founded Santafé de Bogotá. Years later he set out to find El Dorado with 500 horsemen and returned with 25 Spaniards. He died a leper in Mariquita.

Jiménez de Quesada’s expedition was, according to the conqueror’s own chronicle recorded in the Epítome de la conquista del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1550), the first in which Europeans ate the potato: his men saw the Muisca consuming that unknown tuber on the highlands of Cundinamarca in 1537. The fact appears in authoritative secondary sources and is not the subject of serious controversy, though the precise attribution of “the first European to eat the potato” to Quesada over other contemporary expeditions does admit qualification.