Calle de Vicente Gaceo

Vicente Gaceo del Pino was born in 1914 and died on 25 December 1941 on the banks of the Volkhov river, in the thick of the Eastern war. He had gone there as a volunteer of the Blue Division, the unit that Franco’s regime sent to fight alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. He was twenty-seven. Before the front he was a man of letters and of party. He studied journalism and wrote for Falangist publications such as Arriba and Haz. Appointed national councillor of the Falange in 1934, after the unification decrees of 1937 he sided with Manuel Hedilla, was tried and sentenced, and spent much of the war in prison. The city council named this Almenara street after him in 1967, when Madrid’s street names were still filling with figures of early Francoism. Today the street houses, by chance of the naming, the seat of the Official College of Commercial Aviation Pilots, with no connection at all to the journalist fallen by the Volkhov.