Calle Martín Sarmiento

It takes its name from Friar Martín Sarmiento (Pedro José García Balboa, 1695–1772), a Benedictine monk born in Villafranca del Bierzo, an Enlightenment scholar and a pioneering student of the Galician language, who lived at the Monastery of San Martín in Madrid from 1711 until his death. The street marks the southern edge of the Colonia del Retiro “La Regalada,” an estate of single-family houses built between 1925 and 1932 in the Niño Jesús neighbourhood.

The monk who gives this street its name entered the Monastery of San Martín in Madrid in 1710, took the Benedictine habit and never left that cloister until his death, in December 1772. Sixty-two years under the same roof, devoted to studying almost everything. Martín Sarmiento read and wrote on history, palaeography, linguistics, botany and education. Campomanes went so far as to say his personal library was one of the most important in 18th-century Spain. In his lifetime he published barely one work, written to defend his friend Benito Jerónimo Feijóo; most of his output was never printed. Among those manuscript pages is one of the first jewels of written Galician: the “Coloquio de veinticuatro galegos rústicos,” dated 1745, in which he recorded the popular speech of his homeland and became a founding figure of Galician linguistics. Calle Martín Sarmiento runs along the southern edge of the Colonia del Retiro, known as “La Regalada”: two hundred and three single-family houses of regionalist character, built under the Cheap Housing Act between 1925 and 1932.

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