Vicente Blasco Ibanez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a journalist, politician and bestselling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films that were adapted from his works.

He was born in Valencia. At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never went into practice since he was more interested in politics, journalism and literature. He was a particular fan of Miguel de Cervantes.

In politics, he was a militant Republican partisan in his youth, and he founded the newspaper El Pueblo (translated as The People) in his hometown. The newspaper aroused so much controversy that it was taken to court many times. In 1896, he was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison. He made many enemies and was shot and almost killed in one dispute. The bullet was caught in the clasp of his belt. He had several stormy love affairs.

He volunteered as the proofreader for the novel Noli Me Tangere in which the Filipino patriot José Rizal expressed his contempt of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.

He traveled to Argentina in 1909 where two new settlements, Nueva Valencia, and Cervantes, were created. He gave conferences on historical events and Spanish literature. Tired and disgusted with government failures and inaction, he moved to Paris at the beginning of the First World War. Living in Paris, he had been introduced to the poet and writer Robert W. Service by their mutual publisher Fisher Unwin, who asked Service to act as an interpreter for a contract concerning Ibáñez.

He was a supporter of the Allies during the First World War.

He died in Menton, France in 1928, the day before his 61st birthday, in the residence of Fontana Rosa (also named the House of Writers, dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac) that he had built.

He had expressed his desire that his body would return to Valencia when Spain became a republic. In October 1933, his remains were carried by the Spanish battleship Jaime I to Valencia where authorities of the Second Spanish Republic received it. After several days of public homage, the coffin was deposited in a niche in the civil cemetery of Valencia. A mausoleum by Mariano Benlliure remained unfinished and was deposited in the Museum of Fine Arts in 1940. It was relocated to the Centre del Carme [es] in 1988 and, in 2017, back to the museum. It is planned that the mausoleum will be finished in 2021 and Blasco's remains stored in it.