Blood, Sand, Sherry: Hemingway’s Madrid

In the late 1930s, though, that odor did nothing to deter a young bullfighting-obsessed American writer living in the city from frequenting the slaughterhouse.

“This is where the old women come early in the morning to drink the supposedly nutritious blood of the freshly killed cattle,” he later told A. E. Hotchner, his biographer. “Many a morning I’d get up at dawn and come down here to watch the novilleros, and sometimes even the matadors themselves, coming in to practice killing, and there would be the old women standing in line for the blood.”

These days, you won’t find the matadors or the old women: the Matadero has been converted into a dynamic new art center. On a recent visit, I took in an exhibition of Latin American designers — but I wasn’t really there for the art.

I was instead following the tracks of that American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is associated with a handful of places around the planet — most notably Paris, Pamplona, Havana, Key West and Ketchum, Idaho, where he took his own life in July 1961. But none may have held a warmer spot in his heart than Madrid, which he called “the most Spanish of all cities,” referring to its diverse population from every region of the country. He also titled a short story based in Madrid “The Capital of the World.”

“Don Ernesto,” as he was known to the Spanish, spent enough time in Madrid — he was there for chunks of the late 1920s, late 1930s, and parts of the 1950s, with his last visit in 1960 — that he left a distinct, mostly booze-stained trail. With the exception of the revamped Matadero, the modern version of Hemingway’s Madrid is an old-school itinerary of bars, bullfighting arenas and restaurants. So in advance of the 50th anniversary of his death, I set out to experience all that drew Hemingway back again and again to the city.

After starting my tour at the Matadero, I met up with my wife, Jessie Sholl, in front of our hotel, the Tryp Gran Vía, one of the spots where Hemingway stayed (the second-floor breakfast room, named for the writer, displays photos of him in various acts of masculinity like firing a gun or pulling in a huge fish from a boat). 

From there we headed down the Gran Vía, a wide boulevard Hemingway described as Madrid’s answer to Broadway and Fifth Avenue combined, passing by Museo Chicote, a cocktail bar he frequented in the 1930s, when it was popular with international journalists. We then zigzagged through the streets around Puerta del Sol, many recently made pedestrians-only, crossing narrow Calle Victoria, where Hemingway often purchased scalped bullfighting tickets. We walked through leafy Plaza Santa Ana, home to Cerveceria Alemana, a 1904 beer hall that was such a favorite of Hemingway’s that he had his own table (just to the right of the entrance, the only marble-topped table overlooking a window).

A couple of twists and turns later, we reached Calle de Echegaray, its cobblestones shining from a morning rain, and entered La Venencia, an old bar where men in flat caps and tweed jackets sipped sherry from tall, narrow glasses and barkeeps wrote their tabs in chalk on the bar.

We sat down at a table toward the back of the room with Stephen Drake-Jones, who has lived in Madrid for 35 years. “Welcome to the civil war,” said Mr. Drake-Jones, a 61-year-old former University of Madrid history professor, referring to the three-year period, 1936 to 1939, that pitted left-leaning Republicans against the Fascists. Mr. Drake-Jones runs a tour company called the Wellington Society of Madrid. A native of Leeds, England, Mr. Drake-Jones gives a popular Hemingway-themed tour and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the writer’s time in Madrid.

As he pushed glasses of crisp manzanilla sherry toward us, Mr. Drake-Jones explained that La Venencia was — and, in some ways, still is — a haunt for Republican sympathizers. “During the civil war,” he said, “this bar was frequented by Republican soldiers. Hemingway would come here a lot to get news from the front” — in the late 1930s, he was reporting on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance — which would later inform “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” his novel about the war.

“This place hasn’t changed in 70 years,” he added. “It’s like walking right into Hemingway.”

He pointed to an old sign on the wall and translated: “In the interest of hygiene, don’t spit on the floor.” This was, he said, only the first rule of La Venencia. The second rule — no taking of photos — prevented Republican visitors from being incriminated by possible Fascist spies during the war. The third rule: absolutely no tipping. “The Republican loyalists considered themselves all workers — they were all the same — so there was no point in tipping,” Mr. Drake-Jones said.