Calle del Poeta Joan Maragall

Joan Maragall was born in Barcelona in 1860, the son of a family of textile manufacturers who hoped to see him lead the business. He left the factory to study law and gave himself to writing, until he became the central voice of Catalan Modernism from the pages of magazines like L’Avenç. He held an almost religious idea of creation, what he called the “living word”: a verse direct and sincere that sang the landscape, the myths, and the heroes of Catalonia. He translated Nietzsche, Goethe, and Novalis into Catalan. In 1898, after the colonial disaster, he wrote the Oda a Espanya, a pained farewell to an old Spain. His most famous poem, the Cant espiritual, circles death as a return. The street was called Calle de Manuel Hernáez and then Calle del Capitán Haya, after a Francoist aviator. The name changed in 2017 under the historical memory law, not without local protests over the new sign.