Pasaje de Agustín de Betancourt

Behind the name is a Canary Islander who ended his life in the service of the Tsar of Russia, not as a soldier but as an engineer. Agustín de Betancourt y Molina was born in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in 1758, and spent his career moving things: water through canals, carriages along roads, and signals across distance. Around 1798 he was commissioned to build an optical telegraph between Madrid and Cádiz, a chain of towers relaying signals by line of sight. Soon after, he was directing in Madrid the newly created School of Roads, Canals and Ports, the origin of Spanish civil engineering. The Napoleonic invasion drove him into exile. Tsar Alexander I called him to Saint Petersburg, where he built factories and bridges and directed in Moscow the vast Manège, an equestrian hall roofed with a timber span of enormous width. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1824, far from the Atlantic where he was born. The Pasaje de Agustín de Betancourt, a short stretch in Ríos Rosas, remembers him.