The story
In 1894 Joaquín Sorolla, the Valencian painter of sunlight, painted his friend Benito Pérez Galdós seated on a bench, a cigar in one hand and a cane in the other. Galdós, the great realist novelist of 19th-century Spain, kept the portrait for years at San Quintín, his summer house in Santander. In 1973 his grandsons sold it to the island council of Gran Canaria, and it now hangs in the house where he was born.
That house stands on Calle Cano in the old centre of Las Palmas. Galdós was born here in 1843 and left at 19 to study in Madrid. The council decided in 1954 to turn the family home into a museum, and it opened in 1960. Around its two Canarian courtyards are rooms recreating his later lives, his study in Santander and his last home in Madrid, along with his deathbed, his books and his papers, among them the letters he exchanged with Sorolla.
