Real Academia Española: The Guardians of the Language
Why is it significant?
Stand on the quiet slope of Calle de Felipe IV and look at the temple-like building with its columns and its grand staircase. No god lives here. What this building guards is a language, spoken today by around five hundred million people.
Key Facts
| Place | Real Academia Española: The Guardians of the Language |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Felipe IV 4, 28014 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41500, -3.69080 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Barrio de las Letras: Cervantes, Lope de Vega & the Writers' Quarter |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the quiet slope of Calle de Felipe IV and look at the temple-like building with its columns and its grand staircase. No god lives here. What this building guards is a language, spoken today by around five hundred million people.
The Real Academia Española was founded in 1713 by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman who gathered a few learned friends to rescue Spanish from what they saw as chaos. Their motto, still on the emblem, is three verbs: clean, fix and give splendour. Within a few decades they had produced a vast dictionary, in which every word was backed by quotations from great authors, Cervantes above all. This building, the Academy's home since 1894, came much later.
Inside, the members sit on numbered seats, except that they are not numbered... they are lettered. Each chair carries a letter of the alphabet, capital or lower case, so a writer might become, for life, the guardian of chair small b. When an academician dies, the letter waits, sometimes for years, until the others elect a successor.
For most of its history, those chairs were for men only. In 1853 the poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was turned away, and later the great novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán was refused too, despite her fame. The first woman to take a seat was the poet Carmen Conde, in 1979, more than two and a half centuries after the founding. Remember Pardo Bazán; you will meet her again a few stops from now.
This is where the Spanish language is weighed and measured, but the words themselves were born a few hundred metres west, in a cramped district of theatres, taverns and printing presses where the giants of the Golden Age lived as neighbours and enemies. So walk down past the side of the Prado to the fountain of Neptune, and then uphill along the Carrera de San Jerónimo. Two bronze lions are waiting at the top.