Federico García Lorca

Spain's best loved poet – dramatist – musician – artist, he attended the universities of Granada and Madrid, and was know for his cultural liberalism. In 1929 he moved to New York (see ‘Poet in New York'). His masterpiece is said to be ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías' – a lament for a dead bullfighter.

In the 20 years of taking up his pen, Lorca produced at least 9 books of poetry, music, innumerable drawings, several volumes of charming lectures and letters and gave new direction to Spanish theatre. He was strikingly original, elusive.

In 1936, just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was murdered at Granada by Nationalist Partisans (fascists), in mysterious circumstances.

“If God continues to help me and one day I become really famous” said Lorca in 1929, “half the celebrity will be due to Granada”.

Lorca's Granada

In the 1920's Granada was a quiet, sedate, self-constrained country town, little troubled, except during the month of April, by tourists, and very different from the busy expanding place it is today. It's charm lay, of course, in it's situation – the immense green plain, the snow covered mountains, the elms and cypresses of the Alhambra Hill, the streams of noisy hurrying water.

Lorca, pondering Granada,
“……her air, so beautiful that it is almost thought, her crystalline water which descends from the Sierra and ‘lies down to die' in the reflecting pools of the Alhambra”.

Recommended reading: ‘Poet in New York' by Federico Garcia Lorca, ‘Selected Poems' by Federico Garcia Lorca and ‘Lorca's Granada' by Ian Gibson.

Photography

In 2006 Fred Shively had an exhibition in Granada on the 60th anniversary of the execution of one of Spain's greatest poets and playrights.
Click here to view a few of the images that appeared in the show (They were all accompanied by extracts from Garcíia Lorca works).

• Sierra Nevada & La Alpujarra
• The Alhambra
• Granada
• Federico García Lorca
• The Mediterranean
• Flamenco
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