Barrio de las Letras: a self-guided walk through literary Madrid

Most walking tours of Madrid end at the Puerta del Sol. Walk the Barrio de las Letras instead, the small quarter a few minutes south of Sol where the giants of the Spanish Golden Age lived, argued, borrowed money and wrote. Cervantes lived in at least four houses here. Lope de Vega wrote around five hundred plays. Quevedo and Góngora, sworn literary enemies, apparently shared a house. This self-guided route strings the eight stops together in about 1.3 km and 75 minutes, ending on a fried custard pastry unchanged since 1830.

Start: the Cine Doré

Three minutes from the Antón Martín metro stop, the salmon-pink facade of the Cine Doré looks like something from a stage set: cream tiles, curling ironwork, a sign that just says Cine. The cinema itself is older than the pretty face. It opened in December 1912 and got the modernista facade in 1923. Locals nicknamed it the Palacio de las Pipas, the palace of pumpkin seeds, after the shells that crunched underfoot at the afternoon matinees. The Ministry of Culture bought and restored the building, and since 1989 it has housed the Filmoteca Española. It is still a working repertory cinema: classics, silent films, and cheap tickets on the día del espectador.

Audio at this stop is free in eight languages. Open the Cine Doré stop →

Calle de las Huertas and the Ateneo

Walk up Calle de las Huertas, the pedestrian spine of the quarter, where golden verses are set into the pavement and the balconies above the tapas bars are the ones the Golden Age writers leaned from. Halfway up stands the Ateneo de Madrid, a stone-faced institution that looks like a bank and behaved like a revolution. Reborn in 1835 as a private space where ideas could be debated outside the control of crown or church, its members have included six Prime Ministers and every Spanish Nobel laureate. The dictator Primo de Rivera shut it down in 1923 because he feared exactly that.

Two streets away, on Calle de Atocha, the print shop of Juan de la Cuesta produced the first edition of Don Quixote in 1605. The modern novel has an address in this quarter.

The house of Lope de Vega

On Calle de Cervantes, easy to walk straight past, sits a squat red-brick sixteenth-century house with an absurd biography attached. Lope de Vega bought it in 1610 and lived here until his death in 1635. In those twenty-five years Spain’s most prolific playwright turned out five hundred stage plays and three thousand sonnets, some written in a single day. Before that: banished from Madrid for eight years for libellous verses about an actress, married under family pressure weeks before sailing with the 1588 Armada, and later ordained a priest, whereupon he kept writing secular plays and falling in love. The Real Academia Española bought the house in 1930 and opened it as a museum on guided tours; three of his original manuscripts are on display, ink still full of crossings-out.

Where Cervantes lived and died

A few steps further, at the corner with Calle del León, a stone relief of a bearded man marks where Miguel de Cervantes died on 22 April 1616, poor, famous, and finished with the second part of Don Quixote. The house came down on 23 April 1833; the owner refused the king’s order to stop despite a furious newspaper protest, so the street was renamed instead. Cervantes asked to be buried next door at the Convent of the Trinitarias Descalzas, out of gratitude to the order that had ransomed him from five years of slavery in Algiers. Nobody recorded where his bones went. Ground-penetrating radar picked up the trail in 2011, and in 2015 experts announced fragments they attribute to him, with a bullet wound consistent with Lepanto, which cost him the use of his left hand.

Open the Casa de Cervantes stop →

A sherry bar frozen in the 1930s

On Calle Echegaray, a curtain over an unmarked doorway leads into La Venencia, a sherry bar that has refused to modernise for nearly a century. Sawdust on the floor, sherry drawn straight from the barrel, no music, and a standing rule against photographs. Hemingway drank here in 1937, covering the Civil War from a city under bombardment. Order a chato of manzanilla, the pale dry sherry from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and do not ask for a menu: there is no food beyond olives and almonds, and that austerity is the point.

Plaza de Santa Ana

The route now opens into the Plaza de Santa Ana, one of Madrid’s living rooms. The Teatro Español on the east side stands on the site of the Corral del Príncipe, one of the first permanent theatres in Madrid, where the corrales packed paying crowds into open-air courtyards. A bronze Calderón faces the theatre that premiered his two hundred and more plays; a seated Lorca looks more melancholy on his bench nearby. On the west side, the former Reina Victoria hotel was once the Hotel de los Bullfighters, and the matador Manolete always insisted on room 220, believing it lucky.

The alley of distorted mirrors

A short lane called the Callejón del Gato holds a concave and a convex mirror on the wall of the Las Bravas restaurant, and a whole Spanish art form. Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, the Galician dandy who lost his left arm to a café fistfight in 1899, invented the esperpento in his 1920 play Luces de Bohemia: Spanish society seen through funhouse mirrors, magnified and twisted but still recognisably true. The legend, promoted by Valle-Inclán himself, says the idea came from the distorting mirrors of a hardware store on this exact spot. The store vanished in 1933, the mirrors were saved, and a plaque followed in 1991. Order the patatas bravas after your distorted selfie; they are what the wall is named for.

Open the Callejón del Gato stop →

End on a bartolillo

Finish on Calle del Pozo at the Antigua Pastelería del Pozo, baking on this corner since 1830, older than El Riojano nearby. Order the bartolillo, a triangle of fried pastry filled with thick custard, eaten warm on the street while the custard fights back. The street is named for a legend: soldiers looting a convent in the War of Spanish Succession threw two thorns from the crown of Christ into a well, the water turned sweet, and the street took its name from the miracle.

Know before you go

The route is 8 stops on about 1.3 km, roughly 75 minutes at an unhurried pace, flat throughout and almost all of it on pedestrian streets. Start at Antón Martín (Metro line 1) for the Cine Doré; the finish on Calle del Pozo is five minutes’ walk from Sol. Audio at the first stop is free in eight languages, and the rest unlock with a single pass that works across every Madrid tour.

If you want the full narration, the Literary Quarter Ramble is the product: all 8 stops with GPS-triggered audio, so the stories arrive exactly where they happened, from a first print of Don Quixote to a mirror that warped Spanish literature.

Open the full Literary Quarter tour →