Calle Manuel de Falla

Before turning to music, Manuel de Falla dreamed of writing. As a child in Cádiz he founded handmade magazines and, with his brothers, imagined a fictional city, Colón, with its own map and newspapers. In his twenties he swapped the pen for the staff and moved to Madrid to study piano at the Conservatory. From that man of Cádiz came some of the most recognizable scores in Spanish music: La vida breve, El amor brujo, Noches en los jardines de España, and the ballet El sombrero de tres picos. After his years in Paris he settled in Granada in 1920, near the Alhambra, where he became friends with Federico García Lorca. The Civil War drove him into exile: in 1939 he sailed for Argentina and died in 1946 in Alta Gracia, without ever returning to Spain. Calle de Manuel de Falla traces a short stretch in Hispanoamérica, a neighborhood finished in the 1970s. His portrait once appeared on the last hundred-peseta note.