The Pazo del Cuadrante in Vilanova de Arousa, a large stone manor house with an outside staircase, now the Valle-Inclán House Museum

House museum

Vilanova de Arousa

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Valle-Inclán House Museum in Vilanova de Arousa

Ramón del Valle-Inclán · 1866-1936 · Vilanova de Arousa

Visit the Pazo del Cuadrante, the home of Valle-Inclán's maternal grandparents in Vilanova de Arousa, where, according to tradition, the author of Bohemian Lights was born.

Schedule

Tuesday to Sunday · 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:00 (in summer, 17:00 to 21:00)

Admission

€3 · €1.50 concession

Address

Rúa Luces de Bohemia, s/n, 36620 Vilanova de Arousa, Pontevedra

Visits

Guided group tours, also as part of the Ruta Valleinclaniana

The house

The Pazo del Cuadrante

Have you read Bohemian Lights? Its author, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, was born, according to tradition, in the main bedroom of this house belonging to his maternal grandparents, the Pazo del Cuadrante in Vilanova de Arousa, on 28 October 1866.

The house always stayed in his mother's family, and when his parents sold their own home and left Vilanova, Valle-Inclán kept on staying here, where his cousins kept a room for him: “Ramón's room”.

In 1994 a fire destroyed the interior, and Vilanova Town Council bought the house to restore it. Since 2002 it has been the Valle-Inclán House Museum, which uses period furniture and household objects to recreate a cultured middle-class Galician home of the mid-19th century.

The Pazo del Cuadrante in Vilanova de Arousa, a large stone manor house with an outside staircase, now the Valle-Inclán House Museum

The Pazo del Cuadrante, with the patín that leads up to the living quarters. Photo: Furado (CC BY-SA 3.0 ES).

What you'll see on the visit

The ground floor

Where the stables, the wine cellar and the tool stores once were, you'll now find the reception, with sculptures by Lucas Míguez, and a room tracing the history of the Valle-Inclán family since the 18th century, with first editions of his works and documents.

The patín, the sun terrace and the garden

The living quarters are reached by an outside staircase, the patín, where people would chat in autumn and sit in the sun in summer. Behind the house is the garden that Valle-Inclán recreated in stories from Jardín umbrío, with old camellias in the shade of a hundred-year-old magnolia.

The drawing room and the study

The rooms for receiving visitors and for special occasions, with traditional Galician furniture, a writing set, a collection of pipes and another of 19th-century clocks, one of the gems of the house.

The bedrooms and the dining room

In the dining room you can watch a clip from a 1920s film, La malcasada, in which Valle-Inclán appears in Julio Romero de Torres's studio, and listen to a recording of his own voice.

The kitchen

It's the most authentic part of the house: being almost entirely of stone, it survived the fire, with its open hearth (lareira), its dressed-stone chimney and a stone sink under the window.

Additional information

In the footsteps of Valle-Inclán

Valle-Inclán later spent long periods in Madrid, where he made a name for himself at the literary gatherings. There you can follow in his footsteps on the Valle-Inclán theatrical literary free tour of the Barrio de las Letras.

https://museos.xunta.gal/es/museos/casa-museo-valle-inclan

See official information

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Other writers' houses you can visit

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