Almudena Grandes will be named Favorite Daughter of Madrid posthumously

The proposal will go to the plenary session at the end of the month. The area, led by Andrea Levi (PP) already explained that the intention had been for recognition to have come earlier, but the christmas break delayed forecasts.

The tribute to the Madrid writer was one of the agreements reached between the Joint Group and the municipal government to support the 2022 budgets, regardless of whether the mayor, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeidadeclared that Grandes "did not deserve" that recognitionalthough he added that "apart from those unfortunate things he wrote, he was a person who has read many people, with literary prizes and linked to Madrid".

Andrea Levy replied that in no case was Almudena Grandes's literary value in doubt, but that an agreement had to be reached on her decoration with the different municipal groups.

The plenary session of the City Council agreed that be granted a street to the writer and that throughout this 2022 a tribute be made to her literary work.

jacket of heart

The writer, National Narrative Award 2018, always boasted of the benefits of the capital and valued the virtues de la Villa y Corte, one more protagonist in all his novels.

The Plaza de la Guardia de Corps, Calle Moreto, Plaza de Castilla or the Almudena Cemetery are some of the locations in Madrid that he placed on the maps of his novels. "If I were to mark all the houses I have lived in on a map of the city, the result would be an almost perfect circle. Now I live on Calle de Larra, in the same neighborhood where my great-grandfather settled when he arrived in Madrid," he explained. about its roots.

"When I was little, what I liked most in the world was coming to the Center with my mother to shop. I lived next to the roundabout in Bilbao, my paternal grandparents on Fuencarral street, my paternal grandparents on Lope de Vega, opposite the Trinitarian... all my life was spent in the Centro districtbut for me the center was a hub with Puerta del Sol, Calle Mayor, Calle Arenal, Gran Vía and Plaza Mayor," he said.

It was in 2018, during the reading of the proclamation of the San Isidro festivities, where Grandes, married to the poet Luis Garcia Montero, made clear her love and defense of the city of Madrid with the reading of a clear tribute to the city where she was born, grew up and became a writer. "Like a popular and generous fairy godmother, Madrid gives her children two gifts at the moment of their birth. One is water, the incomparable delight of drinking directly from the tap. The other is anonymity. Because in this plebeian town, which prides itself on its condition as much or more than others of its old and aristocratic coats of arms, no one is more than anyone", began Grandes from the balcony of the Casa de la Villa, in the homonymous square.

Grandes described Madrid as "a mysteriously ordered chaos, the Villa that has founded itself behind the Palace's back, and that is not distinguished, nor does it need it" and later lamented that "Madrid is a city that wants to little, much less than it should.

He stressed during the reading of the proclamation that "it is a very beautiful city, a huge city, with large buildings, with wide avenues, old parks and lots of trees, and yet you continue to hear the famous nonsense of the secarral and the poblachón from La Mancha on a daily basis". "Every day someone makes fun of the Manzanares because they don't understand anything. That the real river of Madrid is La Castellana. That his supreme virtue is speed. That his most valuable heritage is his spirit of resistance, the fierce determination with which he clings to life even in the worst moments, which we have had, and there have been many, and very bad ones," he explained to those gathered there.

"Capital of pain, capital of glorythis is the city that never stops, a survivor capable of being reborn again and again from its own ashes," he said.