Calle de Balvina Valverde

The woman who gave the street its name made several generations of Madrileños laugh from the stage. Balbina Valverde Durán was born in Badajoz in 1840 and, having lost her father, came to Madrid as a child. She studied at the Conservatory and made her debut at barely eighteen at the Teatro del Príncipe. She soon found her ground in comedy, as a “character” actress: sharp-tongued maids, elderly ladies, the sort of figures that draw a laugh. Her home was the Teatro Lara, where she stayed for twenty-seven years and won her greatest successes. Her last great role was Doña Sirena in Jacinto Benavente’s Los intereses creados, premiered in 1907, shortly before she retired. She died in Madrid in 1910. The artistic strain ran in the family: she was the sister of the composer Joaquín Valverde, co-author of the music for La Gran Vía. The street runs through the El Viso estate, the neighbourhood that the architect Rafael Bergamín built in the 1930s on a low rise, a raised “viso” that lent it its name.