Golden Age Shadows: Madrid's Literary Quarter

Plaza de Santa Ana

The living room of the Literary Quarter, built over a demolished convent and anchored by the Teatro Español.

You are standing in Plaza de Santa Ana, the front room of the Barrio de las Letras. Before it was a square, this was the convent of Santa Ana, demolished in the nineteenth century. The theatre facing you, the Teatro Español, sits on the bones of something older: the Corral del Príncipe, one of Madrid's first open-air playhouses, where audiences stood in the courtyard to watch the latest from Lope de Vega or Tirso de Molina. Look at the statue across the square.

That is Federico García Lorca, a twentieth-century poet holding a lark about to fly. He belongs to a different century but the same street. The café terraces around you fill every evening with the same noise the Golden Age called the Mentidero: the murmuring of deals, gossip, and verse. This square was the hinge between two Madrids: the convent's silence behind you, and the theatre's noise ahead.

Teatro Español

Madrid's oldest working theatre, standing on the site of the Corral del Príncipe, where Golden Age plays first met an audience.

This is the Teatro Español, but in 1583 this spot was a courtyard surrounded by houses, a stage at one end and the sky for a roof. The Corral del Príncipe was Madrid's second permanent theatre, built when Lope de Vega was twenty-one. He wrote for this stage. So did Tirso de Molina, the friar who invented Don Juan.

Calderón de la Barca premiered Life Is a Dream here. The audiences were loud and stratified: standing in the pit, women in the cazuela gallery upstairs, nobles in the windows of the adjoining houses. The theatre burned and was rebuilt more than once. The neoclassical facade you see dates from the early nineteenth century.

But the stage still occupies the same ground where, four centuries ago, a character first spoke the words 'this is Madrid, the court of the Spanish monarchy.'

Calle Huertas

The main artery of the Literary Quarter, paved with brass verses from the poets who walked here.

The brass letters under your feet are not decoration. They are lines of verse, laid into the pavement by the Madrid city council as a tribute to the writers who lived and worked on these streets. You are walking on words by Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora, Lope de Vega, and others who came later: Zorrilla, García Lorca, Pardo Bazán. The street is named Huertas, orchards, because this was farmland outside the medieval wall.

By the early 1600s it was the spine of the most literate neighborhood in the Spanish-speaking world. Quevedo and Góngora lived nearby and detested each other. Quevedo bought the house Góngora was renting just to evict him. Góngora called Quevedo a scurrilous drunk; Quevedo said Góngora had a nose so large it needed its own parish.

Their feud ran in verse, printed and sold on these corners. Walk slowly. Read a few of the brass lines. Step from one century to another without crossing a street.