Barrio de las Letras: the literary quarter
Verses set into the pavement, the streets of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and the old cafés. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Calle de las Huertas
Start at the lower end and walk uphill reading the pavement — lines of Golden Age verse set in brass letters run the length of the street. Cervantes, Lope, Góngora, all underfoot. Walk slowly with your eyes down; this is the one street where that's the point.

2. Casa-Museo Lope de Vega
The house where Spain's most prolific playwright lived and died, on the street now named for his rival Cervantes — a small irony the quarter enjoys. The garden is tended to a 17th-century plan. Entry is free with a timed slot; if it's booked out, the facade and the irony still stand.

3. Convento de las Trinitarias
The closed convent where Cervantes was buried in 1616, its plaque on the wall of Calle de Lope de Vega — the second half of the address joke. The nuns are still cloistered inside. You can't go in; read the plaque and note that the author of *Don Quixote* lies behind a working convent wall.

4. Plaza de Santa Ana
The quarter's open lung, with the Teatro Español on one side and the statue of García Lorca holding a bird. The *terrazas* fill in the late afternoon. The Cervecería Alemana on the square poured for Hemingway; have a *caña* and sit where he sat.

5. Calle del Prado
Cut north up the street of old bookshops and antiquarians toward the cafés. The Ateneo de Madrid, the 19th-century learned society, sits along here behind a sober facade — peer into the lobby if the door's open; the reading room is one of the city's quiet wonders.

6. Café Gijón
End at the *tertulia* (literary salon) café on Paseo de Recoletos, running since 1888, where writers argued away whole afternoons. Take a marble-table coffee, then walk two minutes to the Sevilla Metro. A fitting full stop for a walk made of sentences.

Barrio de las Letras: the literary quarter