- The conference by the popular journalist will take place on May 8, at 7:00 p.m., at the Pérez Galdós House-Museum
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, May 6, 2025.- The Pérez Galdós House-Museum hosts on May 8, at 7:00 p.m., the conference given by the popular journalist Nieves Concostrina, entitled 'Galdós's convulsive Spain', programmed within the framework of the cycle called 'Women Writers in the House Museum'.
In his speech, Concostrina will outline some of the historical and political events that occurred during the sixty years that the famous writer lived in Madrid during the 19th century.
Galdós lived through a historical period that was as fascinating for his role as chronicler and writer as it was turbulent for Spain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The writer witnessed university repression, Bourbon corruption, the fall of the monarchy, the arrival of the Savoy dynasty, the advent of the Republic, the return of the Bourbons, anticlericalism, Darwin's revolution, among other historical milestones.
Concostrina will talk about all that history that passed before the eyes of the Canarian novelist from the outbreak of La Gloriosa in 1868 that Galdós experienced when he was very young. His realistic social, journalistic and political chronicle is filled with historical details of that city. He will travel through the Galdosian Madrid of the Bourbons, Amadeus I of Savoy, the First Republic, the Bourbon Restoration, Alfonso “And because he died in 1920, he also lives through the Second Republic,” he jokes.
Although he was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1843, few writers have been as linked to Madrid as Benito Pérez Galdós, to the point that Valle-Inclán would say of his novels that "they smelled a lot of cooked." The author of the National Episodes, a collection of 46 novels that narrate the history of the 19th century in Spain, came to the capital to study at the Central University, but his true school was the cafes of Puerta del Sol, the Teatro Real, where he frequently went, and the trams where the people and the gentlemen mingled. Novels such as Fortunata y Jacinta or Misericordia are transversal portraits of the city, in which both the most affluent neighborhoods and the growing metropolitan periphery appear.
The young writer lived in a boarding house on 3 Fuentes Street between 1862 and 1863 during his first months in Madrid and in his home at 7 Hilarión Eslava (very close to another very literary house, the Casa de las Flores) he died on January 4, 1920. A plaque today commemorates the place where the small hotel was, owned by one of his nephews, where he spent his last years. Also on 104 Hortaleza Street, a plaque still announces that the publishing house founded by the writer in 1897 was there, disillusioned after a heated dispute with his editor. The experiment of self-publishing did not go well and he closed in 1904. The Canarian writer has a small but bustling street in Madrid that connects two main roads of Galdosian Madrid: Fuencarral and Hortaleza.
Galdós's Madrid, like Dickens's London or Balzac's Paris, forms a framework with its own identity in the context of the Spanish narrative of Realism in Universal Literature. A merit that, if it is to be considered as such, Galdós, without a doubt, never claimed; Well, before being literary, his concerns always had the objective of “getting into the Spanish soul... discovering being Spanish, knowing what Spain is?” And his singular laboratory was the city and people of Madrid, the Madrid to which Nieves Concostrina will refer.
Nieves Concostrina
Nieves Concostrina, collaborator of several radio programs with her fresh and close way of telling the stories of History, will tour Galdós' Madrid in her conference on September 24.
Nieves Concostrina Villarreal is a journalist and writer. He studied Information Sciences at the Complutense University, but trained professionally at Diario 16 between 1981 and 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 he worked in television (Antena 3 and Vía Digital) under the orders of Jesús Hermida, Mercedes Milá and Pepe Navarro. Since 1997 she has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Adiós Cultural. From 2003 to 2012 he directed and presented “Polvo Eres” on Radio 5 Todo Noticias, and also on RNE he collaborated on the program “La ruta del Quijote”. He has worked with Juan Ramón Lucas “On days like today”, and with Pepa Fernández in “It's not an ordinary day”. Since January 2013, he has collaborated on Cadena SER in the program “La Ventana”, directed by Carles Francino, and hosts the program “Any time past was previous”.
With his publishing house, La Esfera de los Libros, he has published «Polvo Eres. Adventures and extravagances of some restless corpses» (published in 2008 and which has reached 12 editions); «What some stories from History» (2009, with 14 paperback editions and eleven in paperback); «…And to dust you will return» (2010, two editions); «Polvo Eres II» (2011), with illustrations by the graphic humorist Antonio Fraguas «Forges», reissued in paperback with the title «Illustrated Deaths of Humanity»; and “San Quentin was armed” (2012, two paperback editions. In January 2015 it was published in paperback and has already reached its second edition). In October 2014, her first novel, “Antonia,” went on sale, which in January 2015 reached its second edition and a third in paperback. In November 2016 he published «Menudas Quijostorias. This was Cervantes' Spain", republished in 2017.
He has won the Ondas Award for Best News Treatment on Radio, the International King of Spain for Radio Journalism, the Golden Microphone, the Andalusia Award for Radio Journalism, the Villa de Madrid Award for Written Press and the International Parador Stories Award from Spain.
