Calle de Ricardo León

This street is a child of the wrecking bar. When the old iron market of the Mostenses fell in 1930 and the third stretch of the Gran Vía opened, the demolition swept away several minor streets in the neighbourhood. The clearance opened up the northern front of the new square, and that flank is Calle de Ricardo León, linking Calle del General Mitre with Plaza de los Mostenses. The man who gives the street its name led a double geographic life: born in Barcelona but proclaiming himself a Malagueño. He joined the Bank of Spain, moved among conservative literary circles and in 1912 was elected an academician, younger than any before him. His great hit was El amor de los amores (1910), which sold close to a million copies and paid for an estate in Torrelodones he called his “little Escorial”. He wrote an archaic, rhetorically soaring Spanish. He died in 1943 and the council named the street after him the following year. But the writer who sold a million books fell out of the canon almost at once.