The town Hall of Seville last finalizing the purchase of the house cream of the poet Luis Cernuda, a building simple three floors located at number 6 of the street Acetres, in the centre of Seville. The city council of seville announced two years ago that would acquire the property for use as household cultural purposes, but the bureaucratic obstacles and administrative have postponed the consummation of the transaction. The transaction with the current owners would be finished before the end of this month of January, according to confirmed municipal sources, a circumstance that will further the project of musealization of the housing, which appears recorded in the memory of municipal Budgets from 2020.
MORE INFORMATION
The birth house of Cernuda enters in the catalogue of the historical heritage of The City of Sevilla will buy the native house of the poet Luis Cernuda Cernuda, the critical relentless
“the goal of The Council is to reclaim the home of Cernuda and, as in the case of Borges, Saramago or James Joyce, it is a research around the figure of the poet”, explains Antonio Muñoz, delegate to the municipal Urban Habitat (Urban planning), Culture and Tourism.
“sometimes, rarely, I used to light up the room at sunset, and the sound of the piano filled the house, acogiéndome when I arrived at the foot of the marble staircase hollow and resonant, while the brightness wave of light that slid up there in the gallery, appeared to me as a body powdered, warm and golden, whose soul was music.” He recalled Cernuda his home in the poem Poetry, collected in his book Ocnos. Today, the façade is a ramshackle of such a dwelling, where the author was born 21 September 1902, evidence of the oblivion in which widespread many Administrations in spain have dropped to real estate or architectural elements related to their cultural referents.
The town Hall of seville, decided to repair that neglect, unanimously agreed in January 2017 to acquire and rehabilitate the property and designate it a cultural center related with the poetry and with Cernuda, whose deeply poetic in what became one of the greatest exponents of the Generation of ‘ 27. The agreement city followed the necessary declaration of the building as an asset of Cultural Interest by the Junta de Andalucía. “Seville has many illustrious sons and many opportunities are lost in the recovery of its heritage, but we didn’t want to let this opportunity pass, because this is a city that is in debt with Cernuda,” says Muñoz.
The economic and financial situation of the owners of the house -a long-established family of glaziers who has been in the building in timeshare since Cernuda went there as a teenager until they decided to bring it to the sale 580.000 euros in 2016-some with debts in Social Security, prevented the municipal management able to consummate the acquisition. The City also lacked budgetary allocation to execute the purchase and had to resort to a urban development operation consisting in the grant of some land for the construction of a university residence with a value of 70 million euros, to obtain the necessary funds. In may 2019, the city announced that it had finally come to an agreement with the holders of the property by the amount of 460.788 euros. With the start of the new year we have eliminated all administrative barriers.
“The purchase does not mean it will be opened to the public in short, housing is in very bad conditions and it is necessary to first reinhabiting her and then condition it for the cultural destination that finally he is going to give”, explains to this newspaper, Antonio Rivero Taravillo, one of the leading experts in Cernuda and one of the drivers of the acquisition of the property by the city Council. That cultural content is not yet closed. Will be linked with the poet from seville, and with his generation, but has not been pointed out. “We are still in a starting phase, there is a lot to nail down,” warns Smith, who is in talks with Muñoz to build on that initiative. “In the house, in addition to the elements it functions as a museum, we want to have a research element. Our idea is to have a library with copies of the “Generation of 27”, said the delegate of Culture, who, like Rivero, warns that this idea is still in embryonic phase.
Since the city Council calculated the cost of the rehabilitation, an intermediate step and necessary to locate the museum project around the figure and the influence of the poet from seville, around 600,000 euros. A phase that will be developed throughout 2020. “If the bid and award go as planned, in 2021, the project of the house of Cernuda may already be a reality,” notes Muñoz. Between its walls, the young Cernuda discovered the poetry, the music and the relativity of time, so present in his work.
When consumed, the capital of andalusia will be able to add a milestone to the cultural offer of quality that Sevilla has begun to shore up the Palace of Dueñas-whose courtyards and lemon trees Antonio Machado incubated the memories of his childhood – the House of Murillo, in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, and the ambitious project of recovery of the Casa Velázquez, driven by private investors. “It is a path to literary-pictorial very interesting to Sevilla and we are committed to the relaunch,” affects Muñoz.
