The green gates of Velintonia had greeted me many summers before, lying just out of reach behind a crop of overgrown branches. I peered through the bars and noticed with relief that the “For Sale” sign was finally gone, replaced with scaffolding set up to repair the hole-ridden roof. As with each visit, I would daydream about walking into the house at the request of Vicente Aleixandre, a poet who wrote all his verses late at night from his bed. Would he smile graciously as I read him my Spanish poetry? Would he have offered bits of wisdom to a bilingual American poet still finding her voice and place in the literary world? When I finally received an invitation to tour the house in summer 2025, Aleixandre had been gone for nearly forty years. His house remained empty, devoid of any of the books he or his friends of the Generation of 1927 wrote. What now follows is a long journey of restoring the home that has welcomed poets from half a world away, myself now included.
Since I was conveniently staying at a dorm half a kilometer from the house, there was little reason for me to check its location on Google Maps. Nevertheless, I needed to see how the house had changed, even in its digital presence. Nearly fifty years ago, they changed the name of the street to Calle Vicente Aleixandre as a nod to the Nobel Laureate who would have much preferred to keep the original name of Wellingtonia. Then in 2018, the Metropolitano metro stop, a gateway to the university district, became the Vicente Aleixandre stop on the 6 metro line. From Wellingtonia to the hispanized Velintonia, Google Maps now lists Aleixandre’s home as a cultural center, temporarily closed for renovations.
Bajo la superficie
de polvo y moho
encontramos los ecos
del antiguo suelo de madera,
aquellas pisadas literarias
de amigos y los gatos de arriba.
Under the surface
of dust and mold
we find the echoes
of the old wooden floor,
those literary footsteps
of friends and upstairs cats.
Alejandro led me inside, pointing out the former locations of paintings, bookshelves, and the piano. Were it not for playwright Federico García Lorca’s passion for playing the piano, there would be no audio recordings of his brilliance at all. I knew Velintonia would mostly be empty, its occupants long gone, but there were signs of life in the home and garden. We located the space on the floor that held the mark of a comfortable sofa, complete with a removable arm to turn it into a chaise lounge. A circle of chairs reminded me of the documentary that had recently been filmed in the house, replete with the memories of meetings with Aleixandre. Even the floor tiles have a distinct character as each room features different patterned tiles and even layers from the renovation that took place in the 1940s after the Spanish Civil War.
As we made our way to the garden, we paused at another relic of Aleixandre’s life drawn right on the exterior wall. A young child drew Aleixandre’s dog Sirio holding a bone in his large teeth. I found the not to scale drawing quite charming, and I’m humored by the fact that all of Aleixandre’s dogs over the years were named Sirio. A Lebanese cedar tree planted by the poet himself continues to thrive as the centerpiece of the backyard, surrounded by ivy and other ferns. Under the shade of the cedar, I looked up at the house and envisioned birds roosting on its nest of windows and balconies. Alejandro reminisced about past summers when crowds would assemble in annual “Return to Velintonia” events. They would read poems, play music, and share memories about Aleixandre and fellow poets Luis Cernuda, Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. Soon, when Velintonia becomes a house museum, there will be new evening veladas and readings in store. Perhaps chairs will be assembled for poets to meet and write under the bright Castilian sun, cooled by occasional breezes and raindrops.
We went inside once more through the door to Velintonia 5, the upstairs neighbor of Aleixandre’s Velintonia 3. At the top of the stairs, I took in the view of the rooms I had only seen in old photographs. While Velintonia is known as Aleixandre’s home, other writers resided in the newly remodeled upstairs apartment after the war. Amanda Junquera and Carmen Conde organized an “Academy of Witches” with fellow women writers during the late 1940s, partaking in literary gatherings not unlike the ones led by Aleixandre downstairs. Their relationship spanned several book collaborations and trips to El Escorial and Murcia, always returning to Velintonia. Their togetherness can be felt, even now, when reading letters and poems written in these rooms. I could almost see where they photographed each other holding cats and Junquera’s short story collection, Un hueco en la luz (A Gap in the Light).
Standing on the highest balcony, I saw how easy it would have been for the women to talk to their downstairs neighbor between balconies each morning. Velintonia 5 almost looks like any other apartment in Madrid today, it just needs a little TLC. The tiles in the bathroom look much more modern than the ones downstairs, and there are more touches of everyday life. A room with peeling wallpaper. Newer lighting fixtures. A spacious closet with wooden drawers, hangers, and a mirror. We are not so far removed from the past, after all.
When you Velintonear, visiting Velintonia as poets have done for generations, you catch glimpses of its daily routines and rituals. The walls and roof carry the sounds of the rain. An outline of a grandfather clock now marks the time in decades rather than hours. A simple wash basin was a lifeline for an aging poet. From the friendly gatherings of the 1920s to the bustle of Nobel Prize interviews in 1977, Velintonia continues to welcome curious visitors. Efforts are already underway to bring furniture and belongings, with items as everyday as Aleixandre’s suitcases, back to the house. Soon the roof will be fixed, the moldy walls mended, and Velintonia will enter a new era as a house museum. Though it will never quite be the same as its previous incarnation, the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre will now play the role of gracious host for this house of poetry in a quiet corner of Madrid. When we leave, Alejandro rings the bell on the front door, and I promise to return to Velintonear another summer.
Velintonear
Un sustantivo se convierte en verbo,
una casa en marcha
consagrada como panteón
de las letras castellanas.
No la admiramos desde lejos
sino que tocamos sus paredes,
leemos sus libros y escuchamos
las campanas de la próxima velada literaria.
A noun becomes a verb,
a home in motion
enshrined as a pantheon
of Castilian letters.
We don’t admire the house from afar,
but rather we touch its walls,
read its books and listen
to the bells of the next literary evening.
Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She researches the literature and culture of the Spanish Silver Age with a focus on women writers and speculative fiction. Her Rhysling and Dwarf Star nominated poetry has appeared in Star*Line, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated speculative poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). She has published articles on Spanish modernism in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies.