Lorca’s family home in Acera del Casino

The second and third floors of 31 Acera del Casino, which also included a tower, were the home in Granada where the Lorca family lived for most years.

The building was razed in the nineteen seventies with little opposition from the citizens and an apartment block was built in its place.

They lived there from 1917 -when they left the flat on Gran Vía that they had occupied for only one year- until 1933, when Lorca’s parents moved to Madrid. The house, according to the description of Isabel García Lorca, “was “tinged with luxury” and had an extraordinary significance in the life and work of the poet and even in the history of international music and puppet theater. Moreover, it represented the “ideal” of Don Federico: it was near the Casino, the Swiss cafe and the theaters. The stay was only interrupted every summer, from 1926, to move to the Huerta de san Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse) and occasionally, before that, to the spa of Lanjarón to take the waters. Years of quiet and provincial life.

On January 6, 1923 a puppet show was organized in the house of Acera del Casino that would go down in history, devised by Federico with the help of Manuel de Falla and Hermenegildo Lanz.

According to Isabel García Lorca’s description, on the second floor was the entrance, an octagonal courtyard with a balcony on each side. To the left of the hallway was the dining room. The room with the marble fireplace, reproduced in different photographs, was the father’s room: there he read the newspaper and received visitors, almost always peasants who came to consult.

Federico used to take refuge in the glazed terrace from where he could see the valley, Sierra Nevada, the Alhambra, the Albaycín and the hermitage of San Miguel Arcángel. Lorca also shared with his brother Francisco a large room and a small studio.

Mother, on the other hand, preferred the cabinet where Federico hung several paintings by Dalí. Among them a disturbing female nude that was the talk of Granada, and the so-called “painting of the pears”, which appears reproduced in photos of the time and which visitors tried to interpret as a “bottle, a piece of gruyere cheese and a piece of white watermelon”.

In the living-room was the half-grand piano that his father gave Federico and on which Manuel de Falla played for the first time an instrumental version of Stravinsky’s History of the Soldier.

On January 6, 1923, a puppet show that would go down in history was organized in the house of Acera del Casino. The excuse was a gift from Federico to his sister Isabel. For some time Lorca had wanted to recover the old puppet theater but the function also transcended that. It was the antecedent of the premiere, in June of that year but in Paris, of Master Peter’s Puppet Show by Falla. On that day the entremés The Two Talkers, The Mystery of the Magi and The Girl Who Waters the Basil and the Inquisitive Prince, a folk tale that Federico adapted for the stage, were performed. Finally, the aforementioned piano version of Stravinsky’s History of the Soldier, which Falla performed on Federico’s instrument, was premiered. There were also pieces by Debussy, Albéniz, Ravel, as well as medieval cantigas and carols. The performance was closely related to the 1918 commission from Paris by the Marquise de Polignac of the Master Peter’s Puppet Show composed in the house on Antequeruela street.

Federico worked as author, artistic director and puppeteer; Manuel de Falla was conductor and performer, and Hermenegildo Lanz assembled the puppet play, devised the scenery, carved the puppets’ heads and painted 150 flat figures.