Calle de Jorge Manrique

A single poem is enough to span five centuries. It was written by Jorge Manrique (c. 1440-1479), knight and man of letters, on the death of his father. From that mourning came the Verses on the Death of His Father, in which the lines “Our lives are the rivers / that flow down to the sea, / which is dying” fixed one of the best-known images in the Castilian language. Manrique was not only a poet: he took up arms in the war that brought Isabella the Catholic to the throne and died young of wounds from the assault on the castle of Garcimuñoz. The calle de Jorge Manrique runs through El Viso; it was once the calle de Galván y Candela, until the street map gave the poet back a place among the low houses of this 1930s district.