Casa Museo Ricardo León

With his flight from the big city, Ricardo Leon joined the large group of well-to-do bourgeois, nobles, intellectuals, military and renowned politicians who, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, erected their residences in the Guadarrama mountains, looking for a place for rest and inspiration, in contact with nature. This prolific writer also did it in a majestic palace house adorned by 10,000 square meters of garden of conifers and other woodland which baptized with the name of Quinta de Santa Teresa, personage by which it felt true passion. It is a robust dwelling, which like the rest of superb buildings of nobles that were constructed by the zone, inherited the spirit of the old nobiliary fifths that proliferated in the outskirts of Madrid in the centuries XVIII and XIX. It has an unmistakably escurialense air, as the writer himself underlined when referring to the estate as his ‘Little Escorial’.

Although shortly after his death, in 1943, Ricardo Leon almost fell into oblivion, in life he enjoyed a tremendous editorial success, a rare thing for a writer of the time. Perhaps because of that success, Quinta de Santa Teresa became an important meeting point for intellectuals, being visited among others by Jacinto Benavente, Azorín, or Camilo José Cela. The interior of the house is compartmentalized separating the living area from the museum area. In this last one, distributed in the library, room of showcases and chapel, are furniture, bronzes, books, letters, pictures and belongings that belonged to Ricardo Leon and that say much of his life and of the own history.