Madrid remembers its writers. Barrio de Las Letras never let them leave.
By the 16th century, it was theaters that drew the bohemians. Poets, playwrights, novelists, dreamers. The printers, the bookshops, the guesthouses and taverns, they followed. Lope de Vega wrote of honor and conflict a few doors down from where Miguel de Cervantes penned the first quixotic quest. Francisco de Quevedo drank in long-gone watering holes where Luis de Góngora muttered his verse. Hemingway drank everywhere, but we’ll get to that. These streets made room. And literature flourished.
