Calle Juan de Mena
The street bears the name of the Córdoba-born poet Juan de Mena (Córdoba, 1411 – Torrelaguna, 1456), secretary of Latin letters and royal chronicler to John II of Castile, author of the Laberinto de Fortuna (1444). The street was opened in the last third of the 19th century when the land split off from the Royal Site of the Buen Retiro was developed.
Juan de Mena runs through the Jerónimos neighbourhood from south to north, from the Paseo del Prado to Calle de Alfonso XII. For a long time this ground was closed to civilian use because it belonged to the gardens of the Buen Retiro. When the Crown gave up those lands, the grid we still walk today was drawn. It is a late-opened street, with no earlier name: by 1889 the Casa de Bruno Zaldo already stood at the corner with Alfonso XI.
The poet who gives the street its name had trained in Salamanca and then spent two years in Florence, between 1441 and 1443, where he breathed in the first humanism. Back in Castile he wrote his major work in 1444, the Laberinto de Fortuna: 297 stanzas of arte mayor with a strong Dantean echo. So many stanzas earned him a nickname that has survived for centuries, Las trescientas.
In the last quarter of the 19th century his remains were moved to Madrid for the Pantheon of Illustrious Men planned at San Francisco el Grande. The pantheon was never built, and the remains eventually returned to Torrelaguna, where they had come from.