Peñón del Colorado

A few hundred meters past the García Lorca Park, to the left and towards Víznar, opposite the Pepino farm, the only existing construction on that side of the road, are Los Llanos de Corbera (the place of instruction of the troops of the sector of Víznar at the beginning of the uprising of 1936) and, above them, the Peñón del Colorado (Colorado Hill), which have identified the area.

Various testimonies coincide in exonerating the Falange and placing on the CEDA (Confederación Autónomas de Derechas Españolas, the party of Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the person who arrested Federico) the responsibility for the shooting of García Lorca.

There, in an unspecified place, and according to several researchers and witnesses, García Lorca and his comrades in the platoon were executed and buried Federico in the early morning of August 17 or 18, 1936. The theory of Llanos de Corbera has been supported in two books by two prominent people linked directly or through family to the rebel side and, specifically, to the party of Primo de Rivera: the Falange journalist Eduardo Molina Fajardo (director of the newspaper Patria of Granada, attached to the so-called Press of the Movement and author of The Last Days of García Lorca, of 1973) and the general José María Nestares, a member of Falange since 1935, through the “memoirs” written by his son, the also military Fernando Nestares García-Trevijano.

There is another link between both theories: the alleged Memoirs of General Nestares, written by his son decades after his father’s death, were transcribed by Federico Molina Fajardo, son of the Falange journalist mentioned. Both testimonies coincide in exonerating the Falange and in casting upon the CEDA (Confederación Autónomas de Derechas Españolas, the party of Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the person who arrested Federico) the responsibility for the shooting of García Lorca.

The theory exposed by both was also broadly assumed by the researcher Miguel Caballero, promoter of the last two searches for Lorca’s body in the area of the Peñón del Colorado and the Llanos de Corbera with unsuccessful results in 2014 and 2016 and author of The Last Thirteen Hours of García Lorca.

In the images included in the book of the “memoirs” of General José María Nestares, the sentimental and political value that the Llanos de Corbera had during the first months of the war, especially for the Falangists, is underlined through numerous photographs. At the beginning of the war, the General of the Southern Army Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, delegate of Social Aid, Pilar Primo de Rivera or the head of the Falange in Andalusia Sancho Dávila, among others, passed through the training camp.

According to the various testimonies gathered in both books, Lorca arrived at Viznar “with his own firing squad”, which gives rise to the subsequent affirmation of a certain Pedro Cuesta, mayor of Pulianas and collaborator of Nestares: “No, there was no Falangist there. There were the assault guards and those strange men who arrived, who were said to be from the CEDA and who formed the picket line (…). The same ones who took him away”. Nestares told his son that Lorca was shot on August 18 because that day “he left Víznar very early to carry out an operation in the Cerro de los Pollos, and walking along the Víznar-Alfacar road, and close to the training camp, almost in front of the farmhouse El Pepino, he had the opportunity to see how the burials were being carried out”.

Miguel Caballero, on the other hand, insists on the theory of Molina Fajardo and the Nestares. Caballero, in order to write his book The Last Thirteen Hours of García Lorca, sifted through numerous testimonies and only gave credence to the following: “They are those of José María Nestares himself, captain of the first Falange flag in the area; his own son, Fernando Nestares, who took Molina Fajardo to the site of the grave; Joaquín Espigares Díaz, farmer of Víznar and Falange centuria chief under Nestares’ orders; that of the Falangist mayor of Pulianas, Pedro Cuesta Hernández, who guarded the detention center of La Colonia, where Lorca spent his last hours before being taken to be shot”, and that of a Freemason identified by Molina Fajardo as A. M. de F., who was detained there and gave a very detailed version of everything that happened. These five people, he alleges, lived in different places, did not know each other at all and their statements, which were taken at different times, coincide. In the firing squad there were no Falangist elements. It was composed, according to Caballero, “by the following nine guards: Ajenjo Moreno, Benavides Benavides, Salvador Baro Leyva, El Salvaorillo; Jiménez Cascales, selected for his reputation as an ‘accurate marksman’; Fernando Correa Carrasco, Hernández Martín, Rodríguez García and Hernández Jiménez.”

Neither does Caballero believe that Lorca was shot exclusively for political reasons or because of his homosexuality. He rather supports as a cause family quarrels and disputes over the lands of Fuente Vaqueros and Valderrubio, as exposed in his book The Truth about the Murder of García Lorca.

According to Caballero’s theory, the bodies were buried in ancient water wells in the military training area. The two excavations backed by him, in 2014 and 2016, yielded no results.