In some sense, a dual property to that of Valdivia compact is considered, namely the property to be embedded as a closed subspace into a complement of a $\Sigma$-subproduct of a Tikhonov cube. All locally compact spaces are co-Valdivia spaces (and only those among metrizable spaces or spaces having countable type). There are paracompact non-locally compact co-Valdivia spaces. A possibly new type of ultrafilters lying in between P-ultrafilters and weak P-ultrafilters is introduced. Under Martin axiom and...

It is shown that both the free topological group $F\left(X\right)$ and the free Abelian topological group $A\left(X\right)$ on a connected locally connected space $X$ are locally connected. For the Graev’s modification of the groups $F\left(X\right)$ and $A\left(X\right)$, the corresponding result is more symmetric: the groups $F\Gamma \left(X\right)$ and $A\Gamma \left(X\right)$ are connected and locally connected if $X$ is. However, the free (Abelian) totally bounded group $FTB\left(X\right)$ (resp., $ATB\left(X\right)$) is not locally connected no matter how “good” a space $X$ is. The above results imply that every non-trivial continuous homomorphism...