Calle Marqués de Santillana

Behind the title recalled in this Calle Marqués de Santillana is a man who wielded sword and verse with equal skill: Íñigo López de Mendoza (1398-1458), lord of the house of Mendoza and a central figure of fifteenth-century Castile. He received the marquisate from King John II after the battle of Olmedo, in 1445. The reward honored the warrior, but his fame came to rest on other ground. He cultivated learned poetry, dazzled by Italian models, and is credited with the first dated sonnets in the Castilian language, written “in the Italic manner.” From his pen also came the serranillas, brief encounters with shepherdesses on the mountain road. He gathered one of the richest libraries of his time and was a patron of translators and copyists. The street is short, some seventy meters in the heart of the Ciudad Jardín neighborhood, near Prosperidad.