Callejón de Blasco de Garay
Recalls Blasco de Garay, a 16th-century engineer and sailor to whom a later legend credited the first steamboat.
The name comes from Blasco de Garay, an engineer and sea captain in the service of Charles V in the first half of the 16th century. In the port of Barcelona, around 1543, he tried out a system to move a ship without sails or oars: two large paddle wheels on the sides, driven by a mechanism he had devised himself. What he tested was that wheel propulsion; the ones turning the wheels were men.
Centuries later, a report drawn from the Archive of Simancas turned Garay into a forerunner of the steamboat, boiler and boiling water included. The story caught on, travelled through textbooks and patriotic speeches, and the engineer ended up crowned for a feat there is no record he ever performed.
Callejón de Blasco de Garay is a short appendix of Calle de Blasco de Garay, a street in the Ensanche Norte that for years opened onto open country, surrounded by vegetable plots. Today its numbers are split between the Gaztambide and Arapiles districts.