page_title: Madrid
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Madrid / Art and culture / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Español: Grabado calcográfico de Francisco de Quevedo, El Parnaso español
context_page_description: Madrid is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.3 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.5 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union, surpassed only by Berlin, and its monocentric metropolitan area is the second-largest in the EU, surpassed only by Paris. The municipality covers 604.3 km².
  Madrid lies on the River Manzanares in the centre of both the country and the Community of Madrid region, of which it is also the capital. As the capital city of Spain, seat of government, residence of the Spanish monarch, Madrid is also the political, economic and cultural centre of the country. The mayor is José Luis Martínez-Almeida from the People's Party.
  The Madrid urban agglomeration has the third-largest GDP in the European Union and its influence in politics, education, entertainment, environment, media, fashion, science, culture, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities. Madrid is home to two world-famous football clubs, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid.
context_section_description: Madrid has been one of the great centres of Spanish literature. Some of the best writers of the Spanish Golden Century were born in Madrid, including: Lope de Vega (Fuenteovejuna, The Dog in the Manger, The Knight of Olmedo), who reformed the Spanish theatre, a work continued by Calderon de la Barca (Life is a Dream), Francisco de Quevedo, Spanish nobleman and writer known for his satires, which criticised the Spanish society of his time, and author of El Buscón. And finally, Tirso de Molina, who created the character Don Juan. Cervantes and Góngora also lived in the city, although they were not born there. The homes of Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Gongora and Cervantes are still preserved, and they are all in the Barrio de las Letras (District of Letters).
  Other writers born in Madrid in later centuries have been Leandro Fernandez de Moratín, Mariano José de Larra, Jose de Echegaray (Nobel Prize in Literature), Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Dámaso Alonso, Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Pedro Salinas.
  The "Barrio de las Letras" (Quarter of Letters) owes its name to the intense literary activity developed over the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of the most prominent writers of the Spanish Golden Age settled here, as Lope de Vega, Quevedo or Góngora, and the theatres of Cruz and Príncipe, two of the major comedy theatres of that time. At 87 Calle de Atocha, one of the roads that limit the neighbourhood, was the printing house of Juan Cuesta, where the first edition of the first part of Don Quixote (1604) was published, one of the greatest works of Spanish literature. Most of the literary routes are articulated along the Barrio de las Letras, where you can find scenes from novels of the Siglo de Oro and more recent works like "Bohemian Lights". Although born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós is credited with making Madrid the setting for many of his stories, underpinning what has come to be known as the Madrid Galdosiano.
  Madrid is home to the Royal Academy of Spanish Language (RAE), an internationally important cultural institution dedicated to language planning by enacting legislation aimed at promoting linguistic unity within the Hispanic states; this ensures a common linguistic standard, in accordance with its founding statutes "to ensure that the changes undergone [by the language] [...] not break the essential unity that keeps all the Hispanic".
  Madrid is also home to another international cultural institution, the Instituto Cervantes, whose task is the promotion and teaching of the Spanish language as well as the dissemination of the culture of Spain and Hispanic America.
  The National Library of Spain is the largest major public library in Spain. The library's collection consists of more than 26,000,000 items, including 15,000,000 books and other printed materials, 30,000 manuscripts, 143,000 newspapers and serials, 4,500,000 graphic materials, 510,000 music scores, 500,000 maps, 600,000 sound recording, 90,000 audiovisuals, 90,000 electronic documents, more than 500,000 microforms, etc.
caption: Chalcography for an edition of Francisco de Quevedo's El Parnaso Español (1648)
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