Calle de Josep Plá

The name honours Josep Pla, born in Palafrugell, in the Baix Empordà, in 1897. He studied Law in Barcelona but soon traded the courts for the typewriter. He lived off journalism from 1920 and as a correspondent travelled across half of Europe: Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Stockholm and Madrid too. He wrote tirelessly. His more than forty volumes of collected works gather tens of thousands of pages in Catalan. His most widely read book, El quadern gris, grew from a diary he began in his early twenties and rewrote in maturity, blending memory, landscape and portraits of the people of the Empordà. He died on 23 April 1981, the feast of Sant Jordi, the day that in Catalonia joins books and roses. The street belongs to Ciudad Jardín, one of Chamartín’s historic garden colonies conceived in the early twentieth century as a neighbourhood of low houses and greenery, far from the bustle of the centre.