Calle José Celestino Mutis

Before his name marked a street in Madrid, José Celestino Mutis crossed the ocean laden with medical instruments and botanical curiosity. He studied medicine in Cádiz, graduated in Madrid in 1757 and learned botany at the Botanical Garden, where he absorbed Linnaeus’s system. In September 1760 he sailed for America as physician to the viceroy. There, in 1783, with the approval of Charles III, he set up the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada. Over more than twenty-five years he catalogued thousands of species. The whole archive, kept today by the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, holds 6,394 drawings. In 1817, nine years after Mutis died in Bogotá, all that material reached the port of Cádiz in 104 crates: a herbarium of more than 20,000 specimens. Calle José Celestino Mutis begins in the Fuente del Berro neighbourhood, an expansion that Gregorio Iturbe’s cooperative built up from 1926, and its sign follows the same pattern as the rest of that development.