Logbook · 2 places

Birth of Baltasar Gracián

Belmonte de Gracián, Comunidad de Calatayud, Zaragoza

1 Villages · 1 Historical milestones

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Birth of Baltasar Gracián

Historical milestone · Belmonte de Gracián, Comunidad de Calatayud, Zaragoza

Image of Belmonte de Gracián, not of the place itself.

In this village in the province of Zaragoza, in the comarca of Calatayud, the Jesuit and writer Baltasar Gracián was born on 8 January 1601, one of the great figures of Spanish conceptismo of the Golden Age and author of El Criticón, an allegorical novel compared in quality to Don Quixote or La Celestina, and of the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. His prose, dense and full of brief maxims and wordplay, reflects a pessimistic thought typical of the Baroque, and in time influenced thinkers such as La Rochefoucauld, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The town was called Belmonte del Río Perejiles and later Belmonte de Calatayud, and in 1985 it took the writer's surname, who died in Tarazona in 1658, as a tribute to its best-known resident.

1601-1658

Photo: Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What to see and do in Belmonte de Gracián