Calle de Víctor de la Serna

Behind the name stands a man born far from here, in the Chilean port of Valparaíso, in 1896. Víctor de la Serna y Espina came into the world as the second son of the novelist Concha Espina, one of the great voices of Cantabrian letters, and inherited from her the craft of writing, though he carried it into journalism. He founded the newspaper La Región in Santander and later ran Informaciones in Madrid, from where he worked as one of the most recognized pens of his day. The Madrid Press Association counted him among its own, and after his death it established an annual prize in his name that still honors journalists. He also left travel writing, a literary journey through rural Spain that won the National Prize for Literature. From that book he rescued an almost forgotten word: “foramontano,” the Cantabrian who in the dawn of the Reconquest crossed the mountains to resettle the plateau. He spread it until he returned it to speech, a term that had lain sleeping in medieval documents.