Plaza de Donoso

Behind the terse surname that names this square in Almenara stands one of the most feared orators of the nineteenth-century Congress: Juan Donoso Cortés, born in 1809 in Valle de la Serena, in the Badajoz of down-at-heel gentry. He entered politics as a fervent liberal and ended up renouncing all of it: around 1847 he turned into a hardline Catholic, avowed enemy of the parliamentary system he had once practised. His fame was built on speaking. His speeches on dictatorship and on Europe were read and translated across the continent. The Crown made him Marquis of Valdegamas and sent him as ambassador to Berlin and then to Paris, where he died in 1853, at forty-three. Madrid’s street map honours him twice: with the long calle de Donoso Cortés in Chamberí and with this plaza de Donoso in Tetuán. Today it is presided over by the Eduardo Úrculo cultural centre, in the heart of La Ventilla.