Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet and playwright, was born June 5, 1898 at Fuentevaqueros in the Spanish province of Granada. He began writing poems in his late teens, reciting many of them in the local cafes. In 1919 he left to study law at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. There he met and became friends with film director Luis Bunuel and painter Salvador Dali, among other Spanish notables of his generation.
Lorca came to national prominence in 1927 when his play Mariana Pineda was first staged. His initial book of poems Gypsy Ballads was published the following year. During a trip abroad, which also took him to England and Cuba, Lorca spent nine months in New York City beginning in June of 1929. His poems of that period were later collected in the volume entitled Poet In New York.
In 1931 Spain became a Republic which gave hope to many, Lorca included, that Spain's standard of living would be improved, its lliteracy reduced and its culture more widely disseminated. Lorca became director of a student theater company which toured small villages and in the face of harassment by Fascist partisans presented the Spanish classics to the peasants.
His first great play, the rural tragedy Blood Wedding, was staged in 1933. It was immensely popular in Spain and in Argentina which he visited late that year. In 1935 he presented his second village tragedy, Yerma, and completed his third, La Casa de Bernardo Alba.
Lorca spent much of early 1936 preparing Divan Del Tamarit, a cycle of poems written in tribute to Granada's old Arab poets whom he had read in translation. In July, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to vacation in Granada which had fallen to the fascists on the first day of the conflict.
Although he had no political affiliations Lorca was known to be a friend of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty. Apparently this was enough of an indictment for those Falangists who arrested him on August 16th. On or about August 18, 1936 Federico Garcia Lorca, along with a white-haired schoolmaster and two anarchist bullfighters, was driven to the village of Viznar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There at dawn they were executed by a right-wing firing squad. Although his remains are presumed to lie with those of hundreds of fellow victims in a shallow trench among the grove of olive trees adjacent to the Fuente Grande spring, the actual whereabouts of Lorca's grave are unknown to this day.
--Rick Klaus Theis, 8/18/97

Federico Garcia Lorca
House museum
Address: Calle de la Virgen s/n. 18004 Granada
Tel. y Fax.: (958) 25 84 66

Visiting Hours:
10:00 to 13:00 and 16:00 to 19:00
Summer: 10:00 to 13:00 and 18:00 to 21:00
Closed Mondays

The Federico García Lorca Foundation actively collaborates with the City of Granada in all matters relating to the Huerta de San Vicente Museum, the house where Lorca passed his summers between 1926 and 1936, the year of his death.
It was there where Lorca wrote some of his best works: The Divan at Tamarit, The Gypsy Ballads, The Poem of Deep Song, The House of Bernarda Alba, Blood Wedding... Open today as a museum, the Huerta de San Vicente contains the house's original furniture, paintings and objects, such as they were when García Lorca lived there. Among the treasures of the house, one can find the family's piano, Lorca's desk, the scenery painted by Lorca and Hermenegildo Lanz for the performance of La Nina que riega la Albahaca, a drawing by Dal’ dating from the years of his friendship with Lorca in the Residencia de Estudiantes...

At five in the afternoon.
When the sweat of snow was coming
at five in the afternoon,
when the bull ring was covered in iodine
at five in the afternoon.
Death laid eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Exactly at five o'clock in the afternoon.
A coffin on wheels in his bed
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes resound in his ears
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead
at five in the afternoon.
The room was iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.
In the distance the gangrene now comes
at five in the afternoon.
Horn of the lily through green groins
at five in the afternoon.
The wounds were burning like suns
at five in the afternoon,
and the crowd was breaking the windows
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
2. The Spilled Blood
I will not see it!
Tell the moon to come
for I do not want to see the blood
of Ignacio on the sand.
I will not see it!
The moon wide open.
Horse of still clouds,
and the grey bull ring of dreams
with willows in the barreras.
I will not see it!
Let my memory kindle!
Warm the jasmines
of such minute whiteness!
I will not see it!
The cow of the ancient world
passed her sad tongue
over a snout of blood
spilled on the sand,
and the bulls of Guissando,
partly death and partly stone,
bellowed like two centuries
sated with treading the earth.
No.
I do not want to see it!
I will not see it!
Ignacio goes up the tiers
with all his death on his shoulders.
He sought for the dawn
but the dawn was no more.
He seeks for his confident profile
and the dream bewilders him.
He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood.
I will not see it!
I do not want to hear it spurt
each time with less strength:
that spurt that illuminates
the tiers of seats, and spills
over the corduroy and the leather
of a thirsty multitude.
Who shouts that I should come near!
Do not ask me to see it!
His eyes did not close
when he saw the horns near,
but the terrible mothers
lifted their heads.
And across the ranches,
an air of secret voices rose,
shouting to celestial bulls,
herdsmen of pale mist.
There was no prince in Seville
who could compare to him,
nor sword like his sword
nor heart so true.
Like a river of lions
was his marvellous strength,
and like a marble toroso
his firm drawn moderation.
The air of Andalusian Rome
gilded his head
where his smile was a spikenard
of wit and intelligence.
What a great torero in the ring!
What a good peasant in the sierra!
How gentle with the sheaves!
How hard with the spurs!
How tender with the dew!
How dazzling the fiesta!
How tremendous with the final
banderillas of darkness!
But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
sliding on frozen horns,
faltering soulless in the mist,
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquivir.
Oh, white wall of Spain!
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!
No.
I will not see it!
No chalice can contain it,
no swallows can drink it,
no frost of light can cool it,
nor song nor deluge of white lilies,
no glass can cover it with silver.
No.
I will not see it!