The Rafael Alberti Foundation
An open house for poetry
The Rafael Alberti Foundation was established in 1993.
Its main task, as a cultural institution, is to watch over the poet's work, promote his research and disseminate it, as well as to highlight the importance of the Generation of '27 -to which Alberti belongs as one of its most prominent members- in the Spanish poetry of the twentieth century and the bonds of close friendship that united these poets until the end of their lives.
Rafael Alberti is one of the most outstanding, restless and attractive personalities that have paraded for almost a century in the literary, social and political history of Spain. His presence as an intellectual committed to the defense of liberties will always be a living example for young people of any era.
The house where Alberti lived.
The Rafael Alberti Foundation has its headquarters in El Puerto de Santa Maria, in a three-story house, white and bright, simple and typical Andalusian construction in which the poet lived as a child.
In it are deposited not only the childhood memories of the universal poet, but also the donation that, along with his first wife, Maria Teresa Leon, made in 1978 to his hometown, as well as new contributions that are arriving every day to complete the intense biography and work of Rafael Alberti.
This house, very close to the Palacios street where he was born, is remembered in the pages of his memoir La Arboleda Perdida:
“We lived during those years in a house on Santo Domingo Street, with a patio of red flagstones and a large orange tree in the center. It was so tall that I always knew it with its upper branches pruned. Thus, the canopy against the summer sun did not suffer, as its tears spread. The foot of the trunk was embraced by several circles of pots, all of dark and juicy aspidistras. Under the staircase that started from the courtyard and climbed to the second floor...”
Extension.
The City Council of El Puerto de Santa María, the Ministry of Culture, the Department of Culture of the Andalusian Regional Government and the Cadiz Provincial Council acquired the adjoining building so that the exhibition on the poet could be expanded and thus fulfill Rafael Alberti's most intimate wish as a creator:
“...the illusionary and perhaps vain hope that the passage of time will not erase my traces of so many roads traveled”.
