HISTORICAL

In the full of La Letras quarter, in the corner of Núñez de Arce street with Santa Ana square, next to the Callejón del Gato, opened doors in 1915 a typical colmao –a little wine cellar bar with live flamenco dancing and singing-, that today reminds passed times, impregnated with a bullfighting environment.

Not in vain, in the building next to it had been for years a hotel that, until a little time ago, was a meeting point for the matadors that fighted at Las Ventas –the Victoria Hotel-, mong other things because the owners came from the bullfighting world, the picadors Farfán and Céntimo and the banderillero –the one who pierces the banderilla to the bull- Alvaradito.

In 1919 it came to be managed by two hotal industry professionals: Antonio Torres and Tomás Valverde, who tranformed the business, that at first was an Andalusian freiduría (a restaurant specialized in fried fish), into a dance and flamenco singing club with the typical private rooms from the best flamenco tradition. As Arturo Barea tells in his autobiographical novel La forja de un rebelde (A Rebel’s Forge), the dictator borned in Jerez, Primo de Rivera, was regular costumer of this club.

The artistic façade dates back to 1919 is a work of art of the painter and ceramics worker Alfonso Romero and has had to be restored a few years ago; it was covered by framed in noble woods glazed tiles, very typical at the time of Alfonso XIII, that reminds to the ornamentations of the Sevilian Plaza de España, where the visitor could find a run of Andalusian capitals landscapes and two murals dedicated to Madrid, te Cibeles sculpture and the Retiro park.

In its splendour…

The golden age of the Villa Rosa was in in the years around 1927, when the intellectual and the aristocratic classes meet at the colmao to listen to Antonio Chacón already loosing popularity. The flamenco singer received at this club a tribute from Los Andes Count. There appeared frequently historical falmenco singers and guitarists as Pericón de Cádiz, Manuel Morao, Manolo Pavón, Ramón Montoya and Pepe Marchena. Those days the colmao was full of aristocrats, politicians, bullfighters, painters and writers, and even its said Hemingway himself was a regular costumer at that time.

In the 1960’s, it closes and opens doors a year later to be considered one of the most famous colmaos and a classic night club –it’s the oldest one in Madrid- together with such an emblematic places as Chicote, Cock or Balmoral, each one of them within its own style.

Almodóvar used its stage for one of the sequences of his film Tacones lejanos (High Heels) and today its visitors are able to listen to a non elitist famenco, and go for a walk before or after the performance to discover all the bars and livings of one of the labyrinthine clubs in Madrid city.

Useful information

• Villa Rosa
• Address: Plaza de Santa Ana, 15
• Opening times: from Wensdays to Fridays, from 20.00 PM to 1.00 AM; Saturdays from 20.00 PM to 6.00 AM.
• Prices: cocktails 7 €; beer and soft drinks 4€.
• Phone number: (00 34) 91 521 36 89