Poet and essayist of the Generation of 1936, member of the Royal Academy and the Hispanic Society of America, winner of the 1982 Cervantes Prize. Member of a very conservative family from Granada, linked to Falange; in August 1936, he accepts Federico García Lorca’s request to take him into his family home in Angulo Street after the threatening visits he receives in the Huerta de san Vicente. Lorca arrives in a cab on the night of August 9, 1936 and remains there in hiding until the 16th of that month when he is arrested. The protests of some of the Rosales brothers to their fellow Falangists and the demands for his release were to no avail. Until his death Luis was haunted by the shadow of those events.
Luis Rosales participates in the literary bustle of Granada in the twenties and thirties where he befriends, among others, Federico García Lorca, Joaquín Amigo (killed by Republicans at the beginning of the war in Ronda) and Enrique Gómez Arboleya. In 1932, he moved to Madrid where he met Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén and published in the most important magazines of the time, such as Caballo verde para la poesía, by Pablo Neruda, and Cruz y Raya by Bergamín. He comes into contact with the poets of the so-called Generation of ’36: Luis Felipe Vivanco, Juan and Leopoldo Panero and Dionisio Ridruejo.
The arrest and death of Lorca marked the existence of the Rosales family forever and, in particular, that of Luis, who throughout his life made numerous exculpatory statements. The poet and essayist Félix Grande published in 1987 ‘The Slander. How Luis Rosales was persecuted to death for defending Federico García Lorca.’.
From 1937, he collaborated with the Falangist magazine Jerarquía, and in the first postwar period with the newspaper Arriba España and the magazine Escorial. He was also director of Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. He was a member of the Privy Council of the Count of Barcelona and in 1982 he received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for the whole of his work. Among his most important books are April (1935), The Content of the Heart (1941), The Burning House (1949) and Rhymes (1951).
The military uprising of 1936, which surprised him in Granada, had a huge impact on his life, especially since the murder of his friend Federico García Lorca. The poet stayed at the Rosales family home between August 9 and 16, 1936. Almost the entire family was linked to the Falange.
The arrest takes place in the early afternoon. The house is surrounded by armed men under the command of the former Member of the Parliament from the CEDA party Ramón Ruiz Alonso who is accompanied by Juan Luis Trescastro, Federico Martín Lagos and, probably, a third person who has been identified as Luis García-Alix Fernández. According to Gibson’s version, on the afternoon of the arrest, only the Rosales’ mother, Esperanza Camacho Corona, and her sister Luisa, who occupies a separate wing in which Lorca took refuge, were in the house. Given the resistance of the mother of the Rosales family to deliver Federico, Ruiz Alonso went to the Falange headquarters in search of one of his sons, Miguel Rosales, who returned home. Ruiz Alonso accused Lorca of being a Russian spy and of having done more damage “with his pen than others with their guns.”
Personal efforts on the same day of the arrest of Luis and his brother José Rosales to free Lorca are unsuccessful. Luis, who was on a mission in Motril, returns in the afternoon and heads to the Gobierno Civil where the poet was detained. There he has a quarrel with Ruiz Alonso and writes a letter that cost him an internal process and makes him fear for his life. His brother José, known as Pepiniqui, also confronts the civil governor José Valdés. When he returns a day later to the Gobierno Civil the poet has already been transferred to Víznar.
What happened during those days marked the existence of the Rosales family forever and, in particular, that of Luis, who throughout his life made numerous exculpatory statements. The poet and essayist Félix Grande published in 1987 The slander. How Luis Rosales, for defending Federico García Lorca, was persecuted to death..
Rosales died of a stroke on October 24, 1992 in Madrid.
