Calle de Rafael Calvo

Rafael Calvo Revilla was born in Seville in 1842 and died in Cádiz in 1888, aged forty-six, having caught smallpox during a season in the Andalusian city. He took to the stage to breathe life back into Spanish classical theater: he lent his voice to Segismundo in La vida es sueño, to Don Juan in Zorrilla’s Tenorio, and to the lead in Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino. Critics ranked him among the great Spanish actors of his century, able to fill a theater with his handling of verse alone. The street took his name the same year he died. Before that it was called Lanzas Agudas, and its first stretch had even borne the sign Once de Febrero, after the proclamation of the First Republic in 1873. The actor lived a step away, on the neighboring Calle de la Fortuna, right at the corner with the street that now bears his surname, between Santa Engracia and the Castellana.