Calle Juan Valera

The street bears the name of Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (Cabra, Córdoba, 18 October 1824 – Madrid, 18 April 1905), novelist, diplomat and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. The Madrid city council named it on 4 October 1924, fourteen days before the centenary of his birth, in the Jerónimos neighbourhood (Retiro district).

Pepita Jiménez gave him fame; Madrid gave him a slanting street, one of those kinks that break the grid of the residential estate built on the land of the former Royal Site of the Buen Retiro in the second half of the 19th century. Single-family houses rose here on small plots, and Calle de Juan Valera follows the whimsical outline of that parcelling. Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano was born in Cabra in 1824 and died in Madrid in April 1905. A writer and diplomat, his career carried him through the Spanish legations of Naples, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, Brussels and Vienna, and out of that life of embassies and salons came novels still read today: Pepita Jiménez (1874), Doña Luz (1878) and Juanita la Larga (1895). In 1861 he entered the Royal Spanish Academy and held seat I to the end of his days. In 1928 the Paseo de Recoletos unveiled a monument to the writer by Lorenzo Coullaut-Valera, son of one of his nieces. It brings together a bust, a female figure evoking the heroine of Pepita Jiménez and a bas-relief of Daphnis and Chloe.

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