Calleja de Cavanilles
The street takes its name from Antonio José Cavanilles y Palop (Valencia, 1745 – Madrid, 1804), an Enlightenment botanist and the first scientifically trained director of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. It was in Paris, where he went in 1777 as tutor to the sons of the Duke of Infantado, that he came into contact with Linnaeus’s methods through André Thouin and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. His name has been on the street plan of the Pacífico neighbourhood since 21 July 1880, in an area developed south of the Retiro park during the second half of the 19th century.
In the Pacífico neighbourhood there is a small Calleja de Cavanilles that shares its surroundings with other streets named after 19th-century scientists. It entered the street plan on 21 July 1880, and at first was written with a wandering misspelling: Cabanilles, with a b. The man it recalls deserved better spelling, for he was the first to bring order to the world of Spanish plants.
Antonio José Cavanilles y Palop began as a priest, ordained in Oviedo in 1772. The turn came in Paris, where he lived until 1789 as tutor to the sons of the Duke of Infantado and discovered that flowers were his calling. Back in Spain he set about cataloguing the flora of the peninsula and was the first to apply here, with the rigour of a monograph, Linnaeus’s system of classification. Between 1791 and 1801 he published the six volumes of Icones et descriptiones plantarum, in which he described more than 2,200 species. One is world-famous today: the first scientific description of the genus Dahlia, the dahlia.
In 1801 he was named director of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. He reorganised it, grew the herbaria and drew figures such as Alexander von Humboldt to the centre. He died in Madrid in 1804, barely three years at the head of the institution he had transformed.
Its names
- CabanillesAnterior a 1880