Fuente de Aynadamar

The Fountain of Tears is the place of reference where the first investigators who came to Granada to clarify the circumstances of the poet’s murder converged.

One of them was Agustín Penón, who arrived in Granada in 1955 and stayed there until the following year when he went to Madrid and then to New York where he maintained constant correspondence with Emilia Llanos, Federico’s friend who provided him with some of the contacts with alleged witnesses of the arrest and murder of the poet. In 1955, Penón stayed in a hotel in Fuente Grande, now non-existent, to avoid the “tremendous pressure I suffer in Granada with dozens of people who meet me in the street and stop for a while to reproach me for not seeing them more often”, a harassment that gives an idea of Penón’s popularity during the months he stayed in Granada to collect documentation for a book he never finished.

The manuscript and the copious documentation traveled with him to New York when he left Spain and remained inside a suitcase, the “Penón suitcase”, until it was given, after his death, to his friend the theater director William Layton. After Layton’s death, the suitcase with the documents ended up in the hands of a friend of both, Marta Osorio (pseudonym with which he signed his children’s stories from the sixties in Madrid), who kept them until she consented to give them to Ian Gibson, who was then preparing his biography on Lorca.

Gibson took advantage of Penón’s material and published a short book, comparing the borrowed material with the investigations. However, it was not until 2000 when Marta Osorio herself published Fear, Forgetfulness and Fantasy, Chronicle of the investigation of Agustín Penón on Federico García Lorca (1955-1956).

The Fountain of Tears and its surrounding area have been pointed out by different investigators as the probable burial place of García Lorca, although no reliable evidence has been obtained. The Penón himself points out several possible graves in the surroundings, although he regrets the changes in the terrain that made it difficult to determine their precise location in 1955.

Molina Fajardo suggests that Lorca is buried under a post-conciliar and modern church located next to the fountain. “When Federico was killed and buried in this place,” Penón writes, “none of the houses that are now around The Large Fountain existed. It was all countryside, scrubland planted with olive trees surrounding the spring where the water bubbles constantly; the Arabs called it Aynadamar (fountain of tears), on its shore grows a gigantic tree, one of those that are called plane trees here, which spreads a comforting shade (…). If Federico is buried in the pit (…) the prophetic value of one of his poems is impressive given that there are only about twenty meters to the Aynadamar ditch where the water runs: “Mi corazón reposa junto a la fuente fría [My heart rests next to the cold fountain] / (llénalo con tus hilos / araña del olvido…) [(fill it with your threads] / araña del olvido…) [spider of oblivion…)]”. Dream, May 1919. Book of Poems, 1921).