In the winter of 1625, was forced out of this house, penniless, on the orders of the man who had just bought it. That man was , his arch-enemy, who had acquired the place five years earlier with exactly that purpose in mind and was only waiting on some overdue rent.
The two were among the finest poets Spain has ever produced, and they couldn't stand each other for a second. For years they bombarded one another with sonnets about each other's nose, each other's faith and each other's gambling debts. Quevedo later wrote that he'd had to smoke the house out to get rid of the smell of his enemy, and that he'd burned poems by to do it.
Góngora left for Córdoba and died there the following year. The street you're standing on was still called Calle del Niño back then and now carries the name Quevedo, which you might call the last word in that quarrel.
We follow the Calle de Lope de Vega to its end, turn right at the Calle del León and stay on it until the Calle de las Huertas.
Sources. Story: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, esMadrid: Casa de Quevedo; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, itinerario Letras y espadas; Casa Museo Lope de Vega, Comunidad de Madrid, El Madrid de Lope. Photos: Attributed to Juan van der Hamen after Velázquez, portrait of Francisco de Quevedo, seventeenth century, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Diego Velázquez, Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1622, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
