Velintonia, the former Madrid home of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature, the poet Vicente Aleixandre, will pass into the hands of whoever pays at least the 4.5 million euros of the base price at which it is offered in a public judicial auction that the defenders of this heritage considered “an aberration.
This is a procedure processed by a Madrid court to auction the property within a period of twenty days, once the edict has been published in the BOE.
According to information from the auction portal of the Official State Gazette (BOE), the home, at number 3 Vicente Aleixandre Street, in the Vallehermoso neighborhood of the Chamberí district, is a 630 square meter (m²) building in three floors built in 1930 on a plot of 799 square meters (m²).
But beyond the data, it is the house where Aleixandre lived almost his entire life, on the formerly called Velintonia Street, where great men from the Generation of ’27 such as Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego or Rafael Alberti, Carlos Bousoño passed by. , José Luis Cano, José Hierro and many others.
Although many efforts were made over the years for the house to be declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) and thus remain protected, this has not been the case and now, as the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre (AAVA) considers, the property remains unprotected because Its level of protection is Asset of Patrimonial Interest (BIP) and thus administrations cannot bid at auction.
“They have not done anything because it is a totally tortious political decision,” the president of the AVAA, Alejandro Sanz, told Efe, who believes that politicians “are more interested in going to a red carpet and taking photos in a photocall.” to save a heritage of all Spaniards”.
“Culture is not going to the Goya, it is not going to the Feroz awards; it is saving our historical and cultural heritage. That is also part of our culture and that is what they do not do,” said Alejandro Sanz about the politicians who They have not managed to protect Aleixandre’s house.
In June 2022, the Community of Madrid declared the poet’s house an Asset of Heritage Interest (BIP) as having “symbolic value” for having been Aleixandre’s home and for hosting cultural meetings and gatherings attended by various authors.
What the Community of Madrid did declare BIC at the end of 2022 is Aleixandre’s personal archive “due to its cultural and historical importance and due to the bibliographic and archival value of the documentary set.”
This afternoon, Alejandro Sanz, from the AVAA, regretted that there have been “regrettable general directors of heritage, regrettable advisors and regrettable ministers of Culture who have not worked to achieve this protection” for Aleixandre’s home, which “could be converted into a clinic.” dental, in a nursing home or in a college”.
According to Sanz, the new owner of the property “can do whatever he wants by preserving a series of interior spaces,” since the “ignominious aberration” will allow, for example, Aleixandre’s bedroom, “in which he conceived most of his work can end up becoming anything.
The president of the AVAA, who explains how the association has been trying to defend that house that is the heritage of all Spaniards for almost three decades, affirms that “culture is everyone’s culture and it does not have to have ideology.”
“In that house, Aleixandre received left-wing people like Pablo Neruda or Rafael Alberti and more conservative people like Gerardo Diego or Leopoldo Panero, because in the end what united them was poetry and friendship,” Sanz said.
And he adds that “that is what we want to preserve about Velintonia; its open and tolerant spirit; but our politicians want to ideologize everything, all spaces, and that is the problem.”
Vicente Aleixandre, Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1977, was born in Seville in 1898 and died in Madrid in 1984.
