Calle de Julio Nombela

Julio Nombela was born in Madrid in 1836 and died there in 1919, after filling more than half a century with newspapers, serialized novels and stage pieces. He learned shorthand to write faster, and the haste paid off: his complete works, gathered in 1914, ran to twenty-two volumes. His name survives above all for the company he kept. He was a friend of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and joined him in founding the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists around 1873. His best legacy is the memoir Impresiones y recuerdos, in which he recorded Madrid’s literary bohemia and details of Bécquer’s life that would otherwise have been lost. He rests in the Almudena cemetery. The street that remembers him is barely twenty meters long, one of the shortest in Arapiles.