Plaza de Juan Goytisolo

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The space in front of numbers 1–9 of calle Sánchez Bustillo and number 52 of Santa Isabel had no official name until 2018. The plenary of the Centro district approved dedicating it on 19 April 2018 to the novelist Juan Goytisolo Gay (Barcelona, 1931 – Marrakech, 2017), and the Governing Board ratified it on 3 May of the same year by an agreement published in the BOAM issue 8147. The plaque was unveiled on 9 June 2018, the first anniversary of his death. The name honours one of the most important Spanish writers of the 20th century, an author censored under Franco and winner of the 2014 Cervantes Prize.

An open square before the southwest façade of the Reina Sofía Museum, the former General Hospital that Ferdinand VI commissioned from Hermosilla and Sabatini in the 18th century. Today it is a passing forecourt between the Embajadores quarter and Atocha station. Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and lost his mother at the age of seven in a bombing raid. In 1956 he left Spain to settle in Paris, and Franco’s censorship banned his books from 1963. The Señas de identidad trilogy made him one of the central voices of postwar Spanish fiction. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2014 and lived in Marrakech until his death in 2017. The site was chosen with intent: the border between Lavapiés, Madrid’s most mixed neighbourhood, and the axis of arrivals and departures at Atocha, fitting for the figure of the wandering writer. Goytisolo had coined the verb medinear, to wander through the medina with no fixed course, a way of walking that matched the character of the quarter.

Its names

  • Espacio sin denominación oficialAnterior a 2018
  • Plaza de Juan GoytisoloDesde el 9 de junio de 2018
Sources (7)

Crossings