Calle de las Huertas & Cervantes's Last Home
Why is it significant?
Stop at the corner of Calle del León and Calle de Cervantes, and find the stone plaque high on the wall with the bearded face in profile. On the corner here stood the house where Miguel de Cervantes died, in April 1616. On your way along Calle de las Huertas you walked over literature.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle de las Huertas & Cervantes's Last Home |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Cervantes 2, 28014 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41440, -3.69880 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Barrio de las Letras: Cervantes, Lope de Vega & the Writers' Quarter |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the corner of Calle del León and Calle de Cervantes, and find the stone plaque high on the wall with the bearded face in profile. On the corner here stood the house where Miguel de Cervantes died, in April 1616.
On your way along Calle de las Huertas you walked over literature. Lines by the poets and playwrights of the quarter are set in metal letters into the paving, so the street can be read with your feet. And at number 18 you passed Casa Alberto, a tavern founded in 1827, in a building where a plaque recalls that Cervantes lived on that site around 1614. He moved often, usually because the money had run out.
By the time he came to this corner, Cervantes was old, ill and still poor, despite the fame of Don Quixote. Only days before he died, he wrote the dedication of his last novel, Persiles and Sigismunda, opening with an old ballad line about having one foot already in the stirrup. He knew exactly what was coming, and he joked about it. He died on the 22nd of April 1616, and was buried the next day.
The house itself is gone. In 1833 its owner demolished it, despite protests from the writer Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, who begged the authorities to save it. What remains is this plaque, put up soon afterwards. And the street names hide a joke worthy of Cervantes himself: this street, once Calle de Francos, now carries his name... yet the house a few doors along it belonged to his great rival, Lope de Vega.
Down Calle del León, at the corner with Huertas, stands the Real Academia de la Historia, founded in 1738, in a sober building by Juan de Villanueva. But follow Cervantes instead. Walk one block south down Calle del León and turn left into Calle de Lope de Vega. The high brick wall of a convent is where his story ends, and where, in 2015, it took an unexpected twist.