Valencia: where the streets have a name.
Calle Cirilo Amoros is a street that runs between and parallel to the busier Calle Colón and Gran Via Marques de Turia.
It is named after Cirilo Amorós y Pastor, a Valencian lawyer and politician who was at one point the Civil (as opposed to military) Governor of Valencia in 1865.
He was born in 1830 and died in 1887, studying at Valencia University, where he graduated in Law in 1852.
He was a member of the Moderate Party (Partido Moderado) and played a significant part in several important Valencian business, financial and infrastructure ventures such as the Valencia tram network, the Valencia Savings Bank, the fire brigade, the paving of the city’s streets as well as shipbuilding and the Valencia-Almansa railway.
Like so many Spanish cities of the epoch, Valencia still had a city wall in those days, and for better or worse, it was the custom to demolish those walls so as to foment expansion and new building programmes, usually referred to as ‘ensanches’.
Cirilo Amoros applied for a licence to the then Queen Isabel II to knock down the wall, leading to the creation of the commercial zone where his street now stands.
The latter part of the 19th century was one of turmoil in Spain, and Amoros supported the coup d’etat of General Martinez Campos, which was proclaimed in the fields outside Sagunto, which led to the return to the throne of a Borbon King, Alfonso XII.
Alfonso at that time was studying at the Sandhurst Military Academy in Great Britain, and his proclamation of this claim to the throne on 1st December 1874 became known as the Manifiesto de Sandhurst.
Amoros was also an MP, a member of the committee that drafted the Spanish Constitution of 1876, and a founding member of Lo Rat Penat, which means ‘the bat’, and was and is a club dedicated to the defence and diffusion of Valencian culture and language.
He lived and died at number 46 of the street that today bears his name.
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