Calle Iriarte

Calle Iriarte bears the surname of Tomás de Iriarte y Nieves Ravelo, born in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in 1750. At fourteen he crossed the sea to Madrid, in the care of his uncle Juan de Iriarte, humanist and royal librarian. The nephew inherited more than the surname: by twenty-one he was already an official translator for the First Secretariat of State. His fame came from his pen. He honed didactic verse in La música of 1779 and in 1782 wrote the Fábulas literarias, read in translation across half of Europe. His talking, moralising animals are still recited in classrooms two centuries later. Not all was glory: in 1779 the Inquisition tried him for reading banned books, and he was acquitted with fifteen days of spiritual exercises. He died in Madrid in 1791, worn down by gout. The name fits a custom of Madrid’s eastern expansion, where between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries streets were named after writers and scientists of the two preceding centuries.