Ateneo de Madrid: The Learned House
Why is it significant?
Find the doorway on Calle del Prado with the carved name above it, and peer into the hallway if it is open: dark wood, a staircase, portraits looking down at you as if you were late for a lecture. This is the Ateneo de Madrid, and Madrileños have long called it the Docta Casa, the Learned House.
Key Facts
| Place | Ateneo de Madrid: The Learned House |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle del Prado 21, 28014 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41520, -3.69820 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Barrio de las Letras: Cervantes, Lope de Vega & the Writers' Quarter |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the doorway on Calle del Prado with the carved name above it, and peer into the hallway if it is open: dark wood, a staircase, portraits looking down at you as if you were late for a lecture. This is the Ateneo de Madrid, and Madrileños have long called it the Docta Casa, the Learned House.
It was founded in 1835 as a scientific, literary and artistic athenaeum, a club for free debate, born in a decade when Spain was trying to shake off absolute monarchy. In 1884 it moved into this building, with a library that grew into one of the great private libraries of Spain, and a lecture hall where an ambitious speaker could make or ruin a reputation in a single evening.
Nearly every important Spanish writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries passed through these rooms. Benito Pérez Galdós, Miguel de Unamuno, Ramón del Valle-Inclán... and Emilia Pardo Bazán, the novelist the Royal Academy refused to admit, found a platform here and became the first woman to chair the Ateneo's literature section. Upstairs, a gallery of portraits of members runs on and on, a family album of Spanish thought.
There was also a room nicknamed the cacharrería, roughly the junk shop, where members gathered after lectures to tear apart what they had just heard. Gossip, politics and literary feuds rattled around in there like pots and pans. Manuel Azaña, a writer who became president of the Ateneo in 1930, would soon afterwards become prime minister and then president of the Spanish Republic. In Madrid, the road from a debating club to power was sometimes only a few streets long.
Now walk west along Calle del Prado. In a couple of minutes the street opens onto a lively square lined with café terraces, with a white theatre at one end, and two statues of playwrights facing each other across three centuries.