Calle de Enrique Larreta

A writer from Buenos Aires who wrote one of the most Spanish novels of his time gives its name to this street in the Castilla neighborhood. Enrique Larreta (1875–1961) came from a patrician Argentine family and spent years on travel and research to build La gloria de don Ramiro, published in 1908 and subtitled “a life in the times of Philip II.” The novel follows a young man torn between the ardor of the world and the call of the spirit in sixteenth-century Ávila, and became a major work of Spanish American modernism. Larreta lived Spanish culture as a vocation: he served as Argentine minister plenipotentiary in France and gathered a collection of Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art and furniture, with which his Buenos Aires house ended up as a museum. His name came up ten times for the Nobel, without luck.