As if a vital circle were closing, Victoria de los Ángeles, the legendary Barcelona soprano whose birth marks a century this year, returns -in spirit- to one of the places she lived for a long time: Barcelona’s Pedralbes avenue. Those responsible for the foundation that bears her name will be the first to make use of the recently expropriated Hurtado house, on the same avenue. The modernist building by the architect Guillem Busquets (Barcelona, ??1877-1955) had been boarded up for years and the City Council wanted to acquire it to, with the complicity of the neighbours, provide the area with cultural facilities.
The Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation has just announced its plans for a highly emblematic space that is happily rescued from the degradation to which it was condemned. In the context of the presentation of acts of what will be the Victoria de los Ángeles Year, it has been made known that the Hurtado house will thus house a musical diffusion center that will accommodate all the academic and formative part of the Foundation, “which It’s not little.”
“We will also maintain the headquarters in the historic building of the University of Barcelona, ??where the artist was born and lived until she was 25 years old, after which she moved to the top of Avenida Pedrables, in La Creu, before ending her years in Sant Cugat, a municipality with which we maintain a good relationship”, explained the president of the Foundation and daughter-in-law of the soprano, Helena Mora, together with the entity’s artistic director, Marc Busquets.
The City Council had expressed its wish that the Hurtado house house entities rooted in the neighborhood, but at the same time it was studying the possibility of it being an institutional headquarters, due to its patrimonial value. It is a heritage-listed building as a cultural asset of local interest and its reform project foresees that the works will begin in the first quarter of 2024. A reform that would cost around 1.2 million euros.
