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| Lorca's Granada
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We will divide our time, as did García Lorca, between village and city, guided in our choices by the biography and interests of the poet. Although it remains a controversial issue, some historians portray the Arab kingdom as that rare occasion of peace, tolerance and cooperation between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This was Lorca’s vision, and he mourned its loss, regretting the narrow-minded and intolerant impositions of the Christian kings who, after the 1492 Reconquest, drove out the Jews and, eventually, the Moors. Lorca also identified with the gypsies, outsiders, as he felt himself to be. |
 Alhama de Granada |
 Alhama Town Hall
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Alhama de Granada Alhama sits at 2,900 feet in the foothills of the Sierra de Tejeda, surrounded by wheat fields, vineyards and olive groves. Known to the Romans as Artigi, this town commands one of the chief passes from the Mediterranean coast to Granada.
The Moors renamed it Alhama, for its thermal waters. For them, too, the town was key to the defense of Granada. Since it sits on the edge of steep vertical cliffs with the River Alhama nearly encircling it below, it was considered impregnable. Thus its capture by the Christian kings, in 1482, was a terrible surprise and the penultimate assault against Moorish rule. Lord Byron would later translate a medieval poem that depicts an anxious sultan riding up and down in the Alhambra, anticipating the fatal blow. As foreseen, Granada fell ten years later and with it the spectacular flowering of art and science, poetry and architecture that was the kingdom of Al-andalus. In Alhama, we will occupy a lovely 19th-century home recently remodeled as three flats by the Spanish family who has owned it for five generations. Our classroom in the Arab quarter, in one of Alhama’s most historic buildings, was offered for our use as a sign of the town’s warm welcome.
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 Cañón de los Tajos |
City of Granada
In the year Lorca was born, Spain lost the Spanish American War and, with it, the flow of cheap sugar cane from Cuba. The sugar beet boom made Lorca’s father rich and in 1909, when Federico was nearly 11, the family moved to the city of Granada from the countryside to rent a second home.
In the city, Lorca first developed as a gifted pianist and composer, then as a dramatist and poet. Least interesting to him was academic life. In his mid-teens, according to biographer Leslie Stainton, Lorca “preferred Granada’s lyrical sites to its classrooms, and thought nothing of forsaking their work to spend a sunny morning in the Alhambra or a moonlit night in the Albaicín, reading poems by Darío or listening to Gypsy song.” In Granada, we will seek out these lyrical sites so loved by Lorca and use them as our classroom.
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 Fountain of the Lions
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 Albaicín, or Moorish Quarter |
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 The Alhambra
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