Lorca's Granada

“The fruit is hard and skull-like on the outside” Lorca wrote, “but on the inside it contains the blood of the wounded earth.’’

Federico Garcia Lorca 1898-1936

When I lived in Spain, I always seemed to bypass the city of Granada on my way to somewhere else. I didn’t plan it this way. It just happened. And it wasn’t as if I lacked interest in Granada and what it had to offer. On the contrary, Granada seemed for me the very essence of Spain. This was, after all, the city of the Alhambra and flamenco and of Federico Garcia Lorca, whose poems cry out with the passion of cante hondo, the deep song of the gypsies who also live there. “If by the grace of God I become famous,’’ Lorca said, a few years before his death, “half of that fame will belong to Granada, which formed me and made me what I am: a poet from birth and unable to help it.’’ Lorca was murdered and then ignored by the Franco regime but today he is acknowledged as the greatest poet and playwright Spain has produced since its Golden Age.

Recently, I came back to Spain to see what I had missed, driving through mountains and into a seemingly endless panorama of olive groves (“I didn’t come here to be defeated by a sea of olives” Napoleon famously remarked) until the contemporary outskirts of Granada came into view, backed by foothills and, beyond, the shadowy Sierra Nevadas. Granada means pomegranate in Spanish. “The fruit is hard and skull-like on the outside” Lorca wrote, “but on the inside it contains the blood of the wounded earth.’’

Lorca’s Granada has been overwhelmed by modernity, but step onto a side street as the sun sets and it’s possible to see what he saw, if only for a moment. Lorca loved Granada. As a boy, he saw it through the eyes of a dreamer. He haunted the Alhambra, that Moorish wonder which sits on a hill overlooking the city, a sensual vision in golden stone, its walls inscribed with Arabic verse, its archways opening to vistas of splashing water. He would often visit the city’s Moorish Albaicín quarter to spend time with his gitano friends. As he matured as a poet, he would pay homage to them in his evocative Gypsy Ballads (the Moors, I observed on one of my nocturnal expeditions, have returned from North Africa to the city from which they were expelled; in narrow, lamp-lit streets, they sell trinkets, spices, perfumes, henna, kohl and Coca-Cola. Revenge is sweet indeed.)

Albaicín, Granada

Federico Garcia Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, to the west of Granada, in 1898. His father was a prosperous sugar beet farmer. “I love the land” Lorca would say later, “I feel bound to it in all my feelings. The land, the countryside, has been crucial to my life.” In 1908, when Federico was 10, his father moved the family to the city and the village became, “that thing we all need, a Lost Paradise.” In Granada, Lorca went to school somewhat grudgingly and in his spare time explored the city, falling in love with it and what it offered him. In his early twenties, he was befriended by the composer Manuel de Falla who had arrived here to live in 1920. Lorca was by now a budding musician and poet and de Falla was already famous; his Three Cornered Hat had recently been staged in Paris by the Ballet Russes, with sets by Picasso. He was perhaps the most important Spanish composer since the sixteenth century, with themes that speak of the Spanish soil. As James Michener has noted, “his rhythms do not copy the hand-clapping of flamenco, they derive from it, as in that series of twenty one staccato chords that closes the Ritual Fire Dance in El Amor Brujo and the seven strange chords that intrude in the Miller’s farruca in El Sombrero.”

Lorca was now discovering flamenco, savouring for the first time the fiery magic of gypsy music. With other creative spirits, like Salvador Dali, he formed a group, which met on an almost daily basis at the cafe El Rinconcillo on the Plaza del Campillo. Occasionally, they got together at an abandoned Arab bathhouse to hear guitarist Angel Barrios play (it is now the Casa-Museo Angel Barrios, open by appointment). Lorca was to go on to live in Madrid, and then to the far ends of the earth - New York, Buenos Aires - but he always returned to the city he loved and where he felt most at home. He came back to write his poetry and plays at the family’s summer residence on the outskirts of the city. The home is now a museum, which you can visit. The poet’s ink-stained desk is there, and, outside, two cypress trees he and his brother planted in their youth.

Lorca house; Federico's bedroom and writing desk

Manuel de Falla was now a firm friend and mentor. His carmen (small white house) is located just below the Alhambra and it’s open most days as a museum. The two friends organized the first cante hondo concert in June 1922, at the Alhambra. This deep song, this eerie mix of voice and guitar “sings at night,’’ wrote Lorca, “it knows nothing but the night, a wide night steeped in stars.” Both Lorca and de Falla were among the hundreds who gathered under the stars that June evening. The concert continues to this day as a “Night of Flamenco and Folklore’’ during the Festival Internacional de Musica y Danza, held June 15 thru July 15 in the Generalife Gardens near the Alhambra. A flamenco friend, dancer Maximiliano, a talented Australian aficianado and performer, appeared with Mariemma’s company at the festival. He told me later about the experience. “It was magic” he said, “the lights of the city below, the clipped hedges brilliant green against the surrounding darkness, the ripple of a hundred fountains just out of view...guitars, singers and costumes creating a dazzling Andaluz tapestry! Unforgettable!”

Manuel de Falla parlour and piano

As a poet, Lorca was sensitive to his city’s history—those centuries of Moorish influence and culture and then the conquering armies of Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella finally defeating the Arab rulers of southern Spain in 1492. Perhaps it was this sensitivity that gave him his empathy and simpatico. “Being from Granada” he said, “gives me a sympathetic understanding of those who are persecuted. Of the gypsy, the black, the Jew . . . of the Moor, whom all Granadinos carry within us.’’ He wasn’t religious, even though, as a 30 year old, he marched in Granada’s Holy Week processions barefoot, carrying a huge cross. And he wasn’t political. But in Spain, in the turbulent 1930s, his feelings were with the Left. He was a marked man, and in the first months of the Spanish Civil War, he was rounded up with a few others, taken to an isolated hillside near the village of Viznar and shot. He lies buried, somewhere close by, in a mass grave. A memorial park there now honours his memory—and his place in Spanish history.

Lorca Memorial Park

The history that Lorca identified with and revelled in is now the glory of Granada. The Catholic Monarchs lie peacefully in a royal chapel adjacent to the cathedral. The scene is quintessentially Spanish. Above, a handsome wrought-iron grille protects recumbent effigies carved in marble. It is an ornate gilded tableau, a lying-in-state for the king and queen in the city whose capture was, for them, the jewel in the crown. But below, in a crypt directly beneath the catafalques, accessed by stone steps, are two plain leaden caskets in a plain stone chamber. The monarchs had requested burial of the utmost simplicity. They got it.

The tomb of the Catholic Monarchs

But it is the Alhambra which dominates Granada and its history. I came on a beautiful autumn day, arriving early, as the rising sun was just touching the ridge on which the Alhambra stands. It was built originally for defensive purposes in the 9th century as an alcazaba (fortress), with an alcázar (palace) coming later. The founder of the dynasty, Muhammed Al-Ahmar, restored the old fortress and his work was completed by his son Muhammed II. The palaces—Casa Real Vieja—were built by Yusuf I and Muhammed V in the 14th century. The Alhambra became a Christian court in 1492 when the Catholic Monarchs conquered the city. Later, various structures were added, including a military garrison, a church and a Franciscan monastery.

Alhambra entrance, early morning; decorative detail; reflections;

During the 18th century, the Alhambra fell into neglect as its beautiful salons were converted into taverns for the disreputable. Writer Richard Ford was appalled at what he saw. “Bats defile abandoned castles” he exclaimed, “and Spanish criminals and beggars destroy the illusion of this fairy palace of the Moors”. A final indignity came when Napoleon’s troops arrived between 1808 and 1812. They converted the palaces into barracks and blew up some towers. Neglect continued until 1870 when the Alhambra was declared a national monument and restoration began to return the site to its original majesty.

I walked through the massive entrance doorway and into the Alhambra, up a long incline walk to a large garden patio. From here, and from other parts of the Alhambra, you can look down to the city sprawling below, and also across to Sacremonte, a hill pockmarked with caves, home to many of Granada’s gypsy families. There is so much to see within the Alhambra’s fortifications. The palace complex is particularly evocative with its reception salon and royal apartments— the Chamber of the Lions. The famous Court of the Lions is close by, with its twelve-sided marble fountain resting upon the backs of lions. Everywhere here you’ll see exquisite ornamentation— stone carved to look as delicate as lace, and everywhere, too, the imaginative use of water, so important in Arab architecture.

Alhambra windows look out to gardens and to the city spread below

After a morning wandering through the Alhambra, I looked up from a patio filled with cypresses and saw the stone walls which embrace the Generalife Gardens, higher on the ridge. I walked past trees laden with bright orange pomegranates and up a path to the garden. The sun was now high in an enamel blue sky. Far below, the city went about its business but up here, the only sound was a breeze sighing in the trees. I entered the garden, past the new ampitheatre built for the annual festival performances. And what a garden it is! An extraordinary series of “rooms” enclosed by tall green hedges, rectangular ponds bordered with fragrant roses, fountains serenading the visitor with tranquil water music and benches that offer a welcome respite after all the walking you’ve done. The Generalife (pron. heneral-ifay) is justly famous, the perfect way to end a visit to Granada’s golden memorial to Moorish Spain.

The Generalife Gardens at the Alhambra, Granada

Lorca, who loved this place and this city, would certainly have agreed with Francisco de Icaza, who wrote “que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada” —there is nothing so cruel as being blind in Granada".