Calle de Agustín Durán

La Guindalera laid out its streets in the last decade of the 19th century. Around 1887 the city council decided to erase the names born of neighbourly use and replace them with cultural figures, and so calle de Díaz woke up turned into calle de Agustín Durán. Durán was a Madrid man born in 1789, though some push the date to 1793. His youthful battle was a literary one: in 1828 he published, unsigned, a Discurso defending the theatre of the Golden Age against the neoclassical taste imported from France. That same year he began his major work, the Romancero general, gathering the Castilian ballads earlier than the 18th century, completed in five volumes between 1828 and 1832. The scholar ended up caring for everyone’s books. A librarian at the National Library from 1834, by Royal Decree of 1856 he became the first man to hold the formal title of director, a post he kept until his death in 1862. The National Library bought his personal library from his widow, so the ballads he rescued remain within reach of anyone who asks for them.