The Generation of 27 in Spain is one of its most relevant literary movements ever. This breed of writers and poets are known as the Generation of 27 because they became popular around 1927, due to paying homage to Luis de Góngora, who had died 300 years before. They started to meet together and to write their own works with similar literary characteristics, such as the tendency for equilibrium in their poems. Within the Generation there were different small groups that shared the exact same literary movement, but whenever one of the poets published a work that had an important repercussion they went all together as a whole to celebrate it. The last celebration of the Generation of 27 was in restaurant Los Galayos.
Eugenio Imaz, Helena Cortesina, Manuel Fontanals, Santiago Ontañon, María Antonieta Agenaar, Concha Méndez, Luis Cernuda, La Argentinita and J. E. Morena Báez were sitting. Vicente Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda, José Bergamín, Manuel Altolaguirre, María Teresa León and Víctor María Cortezo were standing.
The Generation of 27 celebrated in restaurant Los Galayos the publication of Luis Cernuda’s work named ‘La realidad y el deseo’. With romantic poems such as ‘Si el hombre pudiera decir lo que ama’, the work had a very significant success since it was first published in 1936.
Casa Rojo, now named restaurant Los Galayos, was the witness not just of Cernuda’s work celebration, but also of their last celebration itself. 79 days after the meeting, the Civil War in Spain broke and it divided completely the group. Federico García Lorca was killed, and most of the other authors and poets had to go into exile.
Therefore, the night of April 29, 1936 in Los Galayos was the last reunion of the Generation of 27, as well as the last time Federico García Lorca could dedicate some words to them that were also published days after in ‘El Sol’, four months before he was shot:
“I come to greet with reverence and enthusiasm my little chapel of poets, perhaps the best poetic chapel in Europe, and to launch a cheer of faith in honour of the great poet of mystery, the delicate poet Luis Cernuda, for whom it is necessary to make again, since the XVII century, the divine word”
LOS GALAYOS
Nowadays this significant event that took place in Los Galayos is remembered all over the restaurant. The photographs of the reunion are on the walls of this emblematic building which is still located on the same place where the restaurant started. It was opened on 1894 in the street of Botoneras, in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid.
The restaurant offers very different types of menus and it has also got some terraces in Plaza Mayor reserved for the bar. However, restaurant Los Galayos is specialized on traditional food.
In order to make it more suitable for the guests, there are five different rooms that can be previously booked to have lunch or dinner in a more private space.
Restaurant Los Galayos hides other relevant stories from their beginnings, even though they cannot be confirmed as the commissioned Alicia Grande argues.
The history that comes along with this restaurant has made different authors to visit it and some of them have even been inspired by it, such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, as well as all the curious people that have come to see the 125 years of stories that Los Galayos has.