Velintonia number 3 is not just a postal address: it is a symbol. There a modest home keeps the echoes of generations of poets on their walls. It has no towers or marble, but a symbolic burden that the monumental heritage of Madrid rarely matches. There Vicente Aleixandre lived, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, and there he received, listened and encouraged names that would change Spanish literature. That house was much more than his abode: it was the secret heart of poetry for decades. There they lived the word, intellectual resistance and poetry that survived the dictatorship. It was a meeting place for the generation of 27, of the very new ones and so many others. But for some governments, what has no staircase or oropeles, cannot be a monument.
Despite this living story, for years Velintonia has been institutionally abandoned. The Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre and numerous cultural groups have demanded its statement as Cultural Interest (BIC)the maximum patrimonial protection figure that allows law. But the tour has been plagued with negatives, especially by the successive governments of the Popular Party in the Community of Madrid, who alleged the lack of values to grant that figure. Didn’t your story, its symbolism, your footprint in collective memory be enough? For everyone, it seemed indisputable except for those who decided.
Over time, (2022) instead of the BIC, an intermediate solution was chosen: declare it Asset of patrimonial interest (BIP). A minor figure, without the legal guarantees or the symbolic burden of the BIC. That decision was seen by many as a minimum maneuver, a recognition without conviction. In terms of real protection, Aleixandre’s house was still unprotected against reforms, abandonment or denaturation.
Until now.
The Community of Madrid has finally decided to declare Velintonia as a cultural interest, Thing that will start in a first procedure on July 1 in the field of the Regional Heritage Council. At first glance, the news seems to celebrate poetic justice. But when looking more closely, the glow opaque. The statement is not made under the category of “monument”, as expected for a place with physical, historical and emotional presence, but under one New legal category invented ad hoc: “Memory place”. A figure that does not exist with that name in the Cultural Heritage Law of the Community of Madrid, nor is it developed in state legislation.
The result is a political pirouette, the government chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso in 2025 makes a proposal that appropriates the narrative framework and the arguments it rejected in 2017 when they were formulated by the opposition. Where before it was said that “there is not enough merit”, it is now claimed that the property is fundamental to Preserve contemporary cultural memory.
Paradoxically, the same regional government that has despised memory policies promoted by the central executive – publicly criticizing the Democratic Memory Law— Now collect the concepts of “collective memory” and “symbolic space” as a basis for your statement (BIC-0009/2025 file). A contradiction that cannot go unnoticed.
What should be the best cultural action of the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in this legislature – the public purchase of Velintonia to protect it— is tarnished by the worst statement as BIC that is remembered in the recent history of Madrid with a restrictive and obsolete reading of heritage. It has not been done since the patrimonial conviction, but from the political strategy: protect without rectifying. Because declaring it as “monument” would imply recognizing that previous decisions, such as Marta Rivera de la Cruz – who ruled out that the house had sufficient value – were wrong. The art of inflating categories to save appearances.
Can a patrimonial statement be modified? Yes, legally it is possible. But politically the current counselor has preferred conceptual escapism to material commitment. Getting up category to Velintonia would be disadvantaged, and that, for certain governments, seems more serious than betraying culture. In addition, the chosen category – located to the immaterial – leaves open a door open. The concept of “Intangible heritage” It has become, the words of some experts, into a Sastre drawer without accurate definitionwhere everything fits. A researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) summarized it with irony: “If it can be excavated, it is not immaterial.” And Velintonia can not only be excavated: you can travel, restore, visit, live. It is a physical place (with walls, roof, garden, bars, stairs …), a concrete witness of an era. What the regional government proposes is to protect its poetic memory without shielding its physical structure, as if poetry floats in the air and does not need a place to inhabit. This form of symbolic patrimonialization without tangible body degrades the meaning of the BIC category, emptying it with content and replacing conservation by staging.
Leaving your protection in the field of the symbolic is to reduce your true patrimonial nature. If everything is heritage, then nothing is. Citizens need to understand, see, touch and preserve what constitutes our cultural history. And for this the categories must be clear, solid and consistent with the law.
It is not just a technical or legal debate. Velintonia represents something deeper. Now that it is public property, It is urgent that the statement conforms to what it really is: a monument, a house of poetry. The Community of Madrid still has room to rectify and raise the protection figure. The opposite would be to keep Velintonia in a minor category, not due to lack of merits, but for excess institutional pride. The house was bought, yes: an admirable action. But if the chosen figure does not prevent arbitrary reforms or uses, what is the point of purchase? The value lies in protecting it integrally.
Velintonia has waited decades. He has resisted indifference, bureaucracy and oblivion. It does not deserve a half victory.
Alicia Torija López is deputy for more Madrid at the Assembly of Madrid and Vocal in the Regional Council of Heritage of the Community of Madrid since 2015
(Tacttotranslate) Velintonia
