La Colonia

Las Pasaderas de Víznar was, in the years before the Civil War, a picturesque farmhouse with a mill next to the Acequia de Aynadamar (Aynadamar irrigation channel) located at the exit of the village, on the road to Alfacar. In the summer of 1934, the authorities of the Republic turned the farm, also known as Villa Concha, into a summer house for children, in some colonies where boisterous groups of kids stayed who brought joy to that two-storey building with prodigious views adjacent to the road between the two villages. Although it was only used for this purpose for two years, the chronicles on the history of nationalist repression, the history books of the Civil War and the literature manuals baptized it forever as La Colonia (The Colony).

The historic building was demolished in the seventies and only the remains of the stairs and the mill remain. The Regional Government of Andalusia acquired it and declared it a place of Historical Memory, like the rest of the Lorca sites in Víznar and Alfacar. The City Council of Víznar has proposed its rehabilitation on several occasions.

There, on the lower floor, Federico García Lorca spent the final hours of his captivity before being shot in an as yet unclear location between one and two kilometers away.

The rebels evicted the children from La Colonia in early August 1936 and turned the building into a kind of prison where the detainees spent their last hours before being shot. In the early days, the detainees were executed in Puerto Lobo; from mid-August onwards on the road to Alfacar and from September, when the repression fell on the strikers and Republican sympathizers, in the Barranco de Víznar. This last third was the bloodiest.

The first executed in Víznar, according to Molina Fajardo, was a teacher from Huétor Vega who was taken to Puerto Lobo. In the Casilla Meadow, on the way to the Alfaguara sanatorium, 17 unfortunate left-wing sympathizers fell in the first moments. Also riddled with bullets were Agustina González, La Zapatera, Carmela la de los Pajaritos and two other young women who ran a boarding house on Mesones Street.

Lorca, dressed in pajamas, arrived at La Colonia at midnight on August 16, 17 or 18 from Granada in a vehicle in which the other convicts were traveling, guarded by the jailers. According to the different reconstructions, the vehicle arrived at the Cuzco Palace in Víznar, where the fascists had set up their headquarters, and asked for the permission of the head of the sector, Captain José María Nestares, and then continued on its way to La Colonia.

There, on the lower floor, Federico García Lorca spent the final hours of his captivity before being shot at a still unclear location between one and two two kilometers away. The poet arrived in Víznar by car accompanied by the banderilleros Juan Arcoyas Cabezas and Francisco Galadí, and a common criminal nicknamed El Terrible.

In La Colonia already, awaiting their imminent execution, were the teacher of Pulianas Dióscoro Galindo and a boy accused of armed robbery. Ian Gibson and Agustín Penón suggest that during his time there, Lorca asked for a confessor and that, unable to find the priest, one of the guards helped him say a prayer.

The firing squad that killed Lorca and his fellow captives was formed at dawn on August 17, 18 or 19, and was composed, according to researcher Miguel Caballero, of the following nine guards: Ajenjo Moreno, Benavides Benavides, Salvador Baro Leyva, El Salvaorillo; Jimenez Cascales, selected for his reputation as an “accurate marksman”; Fernando Correa Carrasco, Hernandez Martin, Rodriguez Garcia and Hernandez Jimenez. Caballero has exonerates Antonio Ayllón Fernández since he joined the Víznar front on August 26.

Molina Fajardo, on the other hand, maintains that the platoon was made up of the guards who had transferred the condemned from Granada, among them Antonio Ayllón Fernández, Fernando Correa, Benavides (who would later boast of having blown Lorca’s head off with two shots) and another surnamed Villegas who was part of the black squad with El Chato de Plaza Nueva and El Panaerillo. Among the civilians forming part of the platoon was Juan Luis Trescastro, who for months boasted of having given Lorca “two shots in the ass for being a faggot”.

After the shooting, with the first light of day, the executioners returned to La Colonia in search of the prisoners taken in by Nestares under his protection, who were to perform the thankless function of gravediggers.