Calle Rosario Acuña

Rosario de Acuña y Villanueva (Madrid, 1850 – Gijón, 1923), writer, playwright and journalist, was the first woman to take the podium at the Ateneo of Madrid (1884) and one of the most combative figures of Spanish free thought during the Restoration. The republican city council named this street in 1934, on the old layout of the Iturbe Colony, next to the Quinta de la Fuente del Berro.

An eye disease changed the fate of the woman who gives this street its name. Rosario de Acuña y Villanueva was born in Madrid on 1 November 1850, into a family of aristocratic roots. As the chronic eye ailment kept her from attending a classroom, she learned history and natural sciences at home, and there she shaped a mind opposed to religious dogma and devoted to the emancipation of women. She made her debut as a playwright in 1876 with Rienzi el tribuno. On 19 April 1884 she did something no woman had done before: she took the podium at the Ateneo of Madrid to read at a poetry evening. Her daring came at a price: the drama El padre Juan premiered in 1891 and the next day the Civil Government banned it, and in 1911 an article of hers earned her a criminal complaint that forced her to flee to Portugal until Alfonso XIII pardoned her. She died on 5 May 1923 in Gijón. Calle Rosario Acuña received its sign after the first quarter of the century, so no chronicler of the time got to write about it.

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