Avenida de Concha Espina
It recalls the Santander-born writer Concha Espina (1869-1955), an internationally successful novelist nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Concha Espina was born in Santander in 1869 and lived by her pen when almost no Spanish woman managed it. Fame came with La niña de Luzmela (1909) and grew with La esfinge maragata, a portrait of harsh rural life in León. Her books were translated into several languages and her Nobel candidacy came up more than once, though the prize never fell to her. She died in Madrid in 1955, by then blind.
The Avenida de Concha Espina marks the northern edge of the El Viso estate, the neighborhood of Rationalist villas that Rafael Bergamín built in the 1930s on land at the city’s outskirts.
Today the name is spoken mostly by football fans: the southern facade of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium faces this avenue, and tour visitors enter daily through gate 84. It also names a station on Metro line 9.