Updated:
Keep
Anton Alvarez Alfaro, C. Tangana, is the first Madrilenian from a family of Galicians. His father, who is named after him, is a career journalist although since the end of the nineties he is co-owner of the communication agency Evercom; and his mother, Patricia, was an early childhood education teacher and now manages the administrative and financial part of her son’s business. A middle-class family, they always lived in an apartment between the neighborhood of San Isidro and Puerta del Ángel, where Antón had his school, San Viator, and now, after the boy’s success, his parents live in Pozuelo de Alarcón.
This is broadly all that was known about the origins of the greatest Spanish musical star of the moment…
until now. because the company
MyHeritagea collaborative platform that is dedicated to tracing genealogical threads among its users, has found things at the request of this newspaper that surely not even Antón himself knows.
For a start, there was already another ‘Madrilenian’ in the family before him. His ascending line on his father’s side comes entirely from Galicia, but he had an ancestor born in Salvatierra who was registered as resident in Madrid in 1892: Don Antonio Alvarez Pereira de Castro (his great-great-grandfather).
One of the most surprising findings in the family tree of ‘Pucho’ is that of Don Luis Antonio Álvarez de Puga, a soldier who fought in the War of Independence against Napoleon. And it is that many of his ancestors “come from the lineage of captains”, as they assure from MyHeritage. Specifically, Don Luis Antonio-his 5th grandfather-was Alarm Captain during the war against Napoleon. «We have found in his marriage papers (year 1812) a description alluding to the fact that he served as Captain of a piece of Alarma in Arbo, being at the forefront of the battle. Here we must take into account that the heads of general alarm had to be people of the greatest confidence, patriotism and courage, “the report describes.
The most distant paternal ancestor of C. Tangana that has been found was born in 1680 (11 generations from Pucho) in Santa Maria de Arbo, Pontevedra. This is his ninth grandfather, Juan Álvarez de Puga, who married Ana González.
If no one had told Pucho about it, he would surely like to know that he has musical ancestors on his mother’s side. It has been discovered thanks to the fact that the newspaper ‘El Sol de Antequera’ announced the tour of his great-grandfather, the singer Don Manuel Águila Collantes, with an article published in 1921 in which they praise his vocal skills and his altruistic spirit. “She has come out in turned artistic, through different locations, our esteemed friend D. Manuel Águila Collantes, notable baritone, to whom competent people who heard him at the last charity function organized last Monday, predict a triumph in his new career. We would be very happy if they had confirmation of such flattering forecasts.” The note tells that the singer participated in the solidarity gala with the La Villa sisters performing zarzuelas such as ‘El Puñao de Rosas’, ‘La Canción del Olvido’ and ‘El Diablo en el poder’. In the same newspaper, his death was also mentioned, with this laudatory obituary: «His personality was well known. He enjoyed real popularity and was justly esteemed by all. He had no more ambition than the tireless work to which he gave himself with enthusiasm, always manifesting itself through his cordial, simple and plain character, his fundamentally good man’s temperament ».
The illustrious ancestors do not end there, since his great-great-grandfather Don José Águila de Castro, was an eminence of medicine who received the Gold Medal of the Red Cross, the Great Badge of Honor and Merit and also the Cross of Charity on completing fifty years of professional practice. Born in Granada, he lived in Antequera for thirty years and was Medical Director at the Lanjarón Spa for fifteen. He mentions the newspaper that «it is not enough to say that he fulfilled his duty but that he exceeded it when at all times he was ready to go to the bedside of the sick, and in addition to the help of his great medical knowledge, he carried the paternal care and goodness of him. This is how one of his sons described his career in the newspaper ‘El Sol de Antequera’ in 1929: «The son of very modest parents, he entered the Pious Schools of Granada when he was eight years old. With a very frugal snack, he left as soon as it was dawn, from a miserable house on San José Baja Street, in whose portal there was a modest colonial store that gave enough to live, with extraordinary economy, to the family of its owner, Manuel Águila Fernández. , and he did not come back until nightfall, with a great appetite, not a little cold or heat, due to the severity of the Granada seasons, and some more knowledge than he took from home and that the PP. Piarists, with the proverbial altruism in this order, had taught him. Studying in books that classmates with more fortune than him, lent him, and by dint of prizes that saved his father from having to pay tuition that he could not afford, at fourteen he was a high school graduate. With the same difficulties, but with the same brilliance, he studied Medicine, graduating at the age of nineteen».
Another curiosity of his ancestors is that his great-great-great-uncle, Manuel Águila Castro (brother of José Aguila de Castro) had a hat shop in Antequera, and perhaps this news from 1915 about a bloody fight perhaps foreshadowed the artistic name of C. Tangana .
A captain in the war of independence against Napoleon, a successful singer in solidarity with the most needy, a respected doctor who made himself… who do you think C. Tangana has dated the most?