Federico García Lorca is the best-known Spanish poet and playwright in the world. In his work Andalusian popular tradition, flamenco, cante jondo and the old romances merge with twentieth-century avant-garde, surrealism and a deep reflection on love, death and freedom.
Life
He was born on 5 June 1898 at Fuente Vaqueros, in the plain of Granada, into a well-off family. He studied in Granada, joined the artists of the Café Alameda and, from 1919, the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he became friends with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. He was also a musician and draughtsman: with Manuel de Falla he organised the 1922 Cante Jondo Competition in Granada to save the oldest flamenco singing.
In 1928 Gypsy Ballads (Romancero gitano) made him famous. In 1929-1930 he lived in New York and Cuba: from that experience came Poet in New York, a visionary, dramatic collection published after his death. Under the Republic he directed La Barraca, a university theatre company taking Golden Age classics to villages. In 1933-1934 he triumphed in Buenos Aires.
Works
- Poetry: Book of Poems (1921), Poem of the Deep Song (1931), Gypsy Ballads (1928), Poet in New York (1940), Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935), the elegy for his bullfighter friend killed in the ring with the refrain "at five in the afternoon", The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love.
- Theatre: the three great rural tragedies Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), where women oppressed by convention and desire clash with fate; and more experimental plays such as The Public and When Five Years Pass.
Death
When the civil war broke out in July 1936, Lorca was in Granada, where the rebel military immediately took power. He was arrested on 16 August at the home of the family of the poet Luis Rosales and killed on the night of 17-18 August between Víznar and Alfacar, together with a schoolteacher and two anarchist banderilleros. The reasons for his murder were political, linked also to his homosexuality and his fame as an intellectual close to the Republic. His remains have never been found, despite several excavation campaigns.
Lorca sites
In Granada you can visit the Huerta de San Vicente, the family's summer house, now a museum, the Centro Federico García Lorca in the Romanilla quarter, and the Federico García Lorca Park at Alfacar, near the place of his death. At Fuente Vaqueros his birthplace is a museum, and nearby Valderrubio keeps the house that inspired The House of Bernarda Alba. See also Spanish literature.