Callejón de Jorge Juan

A dead-end alley off Calle de Jorge Juan, in the Recoletos neighbourhood, between Serrano and Velázquez. The parent street was named on 8 February 1866, in the middle of the Ensanche that Carlos María de Castro had laid out in 1860. The man behind the name is Jorge Juan Santacilia, an Alicante sailor known as “the Spanish Sage”. He crossed the Atlantic with the geodesic expedition the Paris Academy of Sciences sent to Ecuador between 1735 and 1744; those measurements confirmed that the Earth flattens at the poles. In Madrid he held a post on the Board of Trade and Currency, tied to the Mint whose site is now the Jardines del Descubrimiento, and from 1770 to 1773 he directed the Royal Seminary of Nobles.

In 1860 the remains of Jorge Juan were moved from the church of San Martín in Madrid to the Pantheon of Illustrious Sailors in San Fernando (Cádiz). That same year the Castro Ensanche plan got under way. The Madrid street bearing his name was approved six years later, when the sailor’s figure had already been the object of that institutional funerary tribute.