14 Facts About Arturo Barea

Arturo Barea Ogazon was a Spanish journalist, broadcaster and writer.

Arturo Barea's father died when he was four months old, so his mother, with four young children to support, worked as a laundress, washing clothes in the River Manzanares, while the family lived in a garret in the poor Lavapies district of Madrid.

Arturo Barea was semi-adopted by his aunt and uncle who were prosperous enough to send him to school.

Arturo Barea left school aged 13 and got a job at a bank as an office boy and copyist, though did not become a fully paid employee for another year.

Arturo Barea later quit after being fined for breaking a glass-plate desk cover.

Arturo Barea served his compulsory military service in Ceuta and Morocco.

Arturo Barea then worked in an office registering patents, and in 1924, he married for the first time.

Arturo Barea was a member of the Socialist UGT and helped found the Clerical Workers Union at the start of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931.

Arturo Barea met the Austrian journalist Ilse Kulcsar whom he married in 1938.

Arturo Barea spent the last ten years of his life living at Middle Lodge in Eaton Hastings, a house rented from Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, of nearby Buscot Park.

Arturo Barea died on 24 December 1957 in his wife Ilsa's arms from a heart attack.

Shortly after his death, Arturo Barea's ashes were scattered in his garden at Middle Lodge, and a memorial to Arturo Barea and his wife was erected behind her parents' grave in the churchyard annexe of All Saints Church, Faringdon, Oxfordshire.

Ilsa Arturo Barea returned to Vienna; in 1966 publishing Vienna: legend and reality and died there while working on her autobiography.

Arturo Barea is a central figure in Amanda Vaill's non-fiction book Hotel Florida, published in 2014.