Calle de Estébanez Calderón

Behind this sign breathes a man from Málaga who signed his work “El Solitario”. Serafín Estébanez Calderón was born in Málaga in 1799, was orphaned as a young child and grew up under the care of an aunt and uncle who paid for a fine education. At twenty he won the chair of Greek in Granada; in 1830 he made the leap to Madrid, where he founded the magazine Cartas Españolas with Mesonero Romanos. His major book, Escenas andaluzas (1847), portrayed the inns, smugglers, bullfighters and dances of the south in prose full of colour, making him the great chronicler of Andalusian local customs. A lover of Arabic, he gathered a library so rich that, at his death in 1867, it ended up in the National Library. The one who secured his memory was his own nephew: Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, future architect of the Restoration, devoted a biography to him titled El Solitario y su tiempo.