The house where Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros

Federico García Lorca came into the world in the house at number 4 Trinidad Street in Fuente Vaqueros (today Federico García Lorca Street) at “twelve o’clock at night” on June 5, 1898 and was baptized six days later with the name of Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (Federico of the Sacred Heart of Jesus).

His parents were Federico García Rodríguez, a wealthy farmer and owner of numerous lands in the Vega, who had been widowed by his first wife, Matilde Palacios, a few years earlier, and Vicenta Lorca Romero, a teacher assigned to the school of Fuente Vaqueros in 1893, a year after obtaining her degree. Vicenta arrived in the town accompanied by her mother, who died a few months later.

The couple remained in the house on Trinidad Street for only a few years. In 1901, they moved to Iglesia street where the family resided until their move, in 1906, to the neighboring village of Asquerosa (Disgusting) (Valderrubio) where business demanded the presence of Federico García Rodríguez. The nucleus of the García Lorca family expanded rapidly. After Federico came Luis, who did not survive; Francisco (1902), Concha (1903) and years later, in 1909, already installed in the Granada apartment, Isabel.

His interests were puppets and music. His favorite game consisted of saying mass. He would sit his brother Francisco and other children down and, covered himself with woven fabric gowns, he would ‘officiate’ the mass on one condition: that the audience would burst into tears during the sermon.

The García Lorca Birthplace Museum was inaugurated on July 29, 1986 on the 50th anniversary of his shooting. The house was acquired in 1982 by the Diputación de Granada and rebuilt under the supervision of Isabel García Lorca. It was the first museum dedicated to the poet in Granada.

Subsequently, in 1998, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth, the Federico García Lorca Research Center was opened in the building of the old schools, to store and make available to investigators the important archive on Lorca indicating purchases and donations. The poet Juan de Loxa was the first director of the House-Museum and the driving force behind the Research Center, the continuous cultural activities dedicated to Federico and the donations from friends and colleagues.

In 1928, in an interview by Ernesto Giménez Caballero published in La Gaceta Literaria, Lorca summarized his early years in Fuente Vaqueros as follows: “My childhood is the obsession of some silverware and some portraits of that other who could have been my mother, Matilde Palacios. My childhood is learning letters and music with my mother, being a rich boy in the village, bossy.” Federico entered the village school very early. Thanks to his mother’s friendly relations with Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, the teacher who had succeeded her at the head of the kindergarten school in Fuente Vaqueros. Federico began his schooling at the age of four. Classes were in the morning and the afternoon was reserved for games. The teacher shared many of those afternoon leisure hours with Federico and followed his career as a poet and playwright with undisguised pride.

He was a withdrawn child and did not participate much in games. Carmen Ramos, daughter of the wet nurse who weaned Federico and friend of his childhood days, remembers him like this: “He never went out. Or rather, he only went out to accompany Doña Vicenta, who was very pious, to church, or to go to school with Antonio”. His clumsy gait, his slow reflexes (he had flat feet and one leg slightly longer than the other) and the undisguised pride of belonging to a rich family encouraged his sedentary tastes.

His favorite game consisted of saying mass. His other interests were puppets and music. “In the courtyard there was a small wall where he placed an image of the Virgin and some roses taken from the garden. In front of that improvised altar he would make his brother Francisco and me sit,” Carmen Ramos says. And once the spectators were seated and he had covered himself with woven fabric gowns, he would officiate the mass on one condition: that the audience would burst into tears during the sermon.

Those theatrical masses in which Federico officiated as actor, director, decorator and scriptwriter persisted as an adult. Manuel Ángeles Ortiz recalls how Federico, in his workshop in Madrid, when he was already living in the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students’ Residence), “told us communicoon almost every day”. “Wrapped in some old brocades that I had, he would even go so far as to give us communion with pieces of sponge cake.” The initial masses in the Fuente Vaqueros house gave way to a less solemn and permanent theater: the puppet theater. A puppet company arrived one year in Fuente Vaqueros and captivated the boy, so much so that he began to produce his own performances. “All of us recognized ourselves in Federico’s puppets: my mother, Don Antonio, the servants and me… In the same way we recognized ourselves later in one or another of his plays,” explains Carmen Ramos.

A cousin of Federico’s, Clotilde García Picossi, revealed to journalist Antonio Ramos Espejo Federico’s first appearance on stage when he was just a few years old, in Fuente Vaqueros: “There was a man who liked theater very much; he was the son of an chemist. And he arranged for us to represent The Joy of the Garden. Then, I would take my cousin Federico by the hand. I was eight or ten years old, and Federico, very young, would hold my hand dressed as a gypsy. There was a gypsy girl singing with her babies. It was a theater for fun. We also did The Altar Boy and others… We did the theater in the yard. People could see us even from the rooftops. We already gave sessions for money and everything. In Fuente Vaqueros many people loved the theater”.

Music was his other great passion. The large García family used to entertain their gatherings by singing and chanting popular songs. In them a good part of Andalusian and flamenco folklore was summarized. By the age of eight Federico knew more than a hundred popular ballads. His contact and learning of cultured music, however, would not occur until the family moved to Granada, in 1908, and the beginning of classes with another memorable character: Antonio Segura Mesa, a notable composer without success who was also the teacher of the composer Ángel Barrios, of the master Francisco Alonso and to whom Federico dedicated Impressions and Landscapes, his first book.

Federico lived at one with nature. He ascribed to each thing, furniture, object, tree, stone, a personality. “He conversed with them and loved them.” In the courtyard of the house there was a row of musical poplar trees that seemed to talk to each other when the wind moved their branches.

Reading also occupied an essential place in the child’s upbringing. Vicenta Lorca was a great fan of Victor Hugo’s novels, which she read aloud and which left obvious traces in Lorca’s early work. “From the time he first heard his mother read Victor Hugo aloud until he found a voice seasoned with the Suites and the Poem of the Deep Song, the young writer was searching for himself, wondering about his words as a way of understanding his own identity,” writes Luis García Montero in A Reader Called Federico García Lorca. Hugo was later joined by Hesiod, Plato and Shakespeare. And then Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Verlaine. Later came Oscar Wilde, Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, who “facilitated an intimate dialogue in which Federico García Lorca found his meaning when writing,” according to Luis García Montero in his study.

But the great influence Federico received in those early years was that of the splendid rural landscape of the Vega de Granada and the extension of nature. “Being a child,” he declared in 1934 in Buenos Aires, “I lived at one with nature. Like all children, I attributed to each thing, furniture, object, tree, stone, its personality. I conversed with them and loved them”. In the courtyard of the house there was a row of musical poplars that seemed to talk to each other when the wind moved their branches. “I used to spend hours accompanying the song of the poplars with my voice. Another day I stopped in amazement. Someone was pronouncing my name, separating the syllables as if spelling: ‘Fe… de… de… ri… co’. I looked around and saw no one. However, my name was still ringing in my ears. After listening for a long time, I found the reason. It was the branches of an old poplar tree that were brushing against each other and producing a monotonous, plaintive noise that sounded like my name to me.”

In Fuente Vaqueros, Federico, a rich boy, also experienced the feeling of social injustice. In My Little Blonde Friend, included in My Village, Federico recalls the story of a poor family in Fuente Vaqueros and, in particular, of the mother, whom he calls “martyr of life and work”. “Many times she would tell me: `Child, tomorrow don’t come, because we will wash our clothes…’ And I would not go. And I wouldn’t go. What tragedies, so deep and so quiet! I couldn’t go because they were naked and terrified of cold, washing their rags, the only ones they had. …. That is why when I returned to my house and looked at the closet, loaded with clean and scented clothes, I felt great uneasiness and a cold weight in my heart”.

Lorca’s relationship with his hometown was never clouded. On the contrary. May 21, 1929. La Fuente, as Fuente Vaqueros is popularly known, paid tribute to him after the premiere in Granada of Mariana Pineda. His brief intervention was precisely about villages and fountains: “A village without a fountain is closed, as if darkened, and each house is a world apart that defends from the neighbor. Fountain is the name of this village. A fountain that has its heart in the source of beneficial water”.

Already in full Republic, in 1931, during the first days of September, Lorca read in his town the Allocution to Fuente Vaqueros on the occasion of the inauguration of the library. The allocution is a continuous praise of his town and a “modest and small lesson” about the “work it has cost mankind to get to make books to put them in all hands”. In it Lorca explains to his countrymen that “when in Madrid or elsewhere they ask me the place of my birth, in journalistic surveys or anywhere, I say that I was born in Fuente Vaqueros, so that the glory or the fame that has to do with me falls also on this very nice, very modern, on this playful and liberal people of the Fountain”. The Allocution also contains statements full of social commitment: “I, if I were hungry and helpless in the street, I would not ask for a loaf of bread but for half a loaf and a book. And from here I violently attack those who only talk about economic demands without ever mentioning cultural ones”.