Huerta del Tamarit

Before Don Federico García Rodríguez bought the Huerta de San Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse), where Federico García Lorca spent his summers and wrote a substantial part of his adult work from 1926 onwards, he was interested in another similar property located nearby, the Huerta del Tamarit (Tamarit Farmhouse) (Garden of Dates, in Arabic), five hectares of irrigated land next to the Genil, in the Pago del Jaragüi or Jaragüit Bajo, according to the contradictory names of the settlements recorded in the books of the irrigators of the Acequia Gorda (Large Irrigation Channel).

One farm was then only fifteen minutes away from the other on foot. Don Federico, however, preferred at that time, in 1918, to lend it to his brother Francisco, father of Carmen and Clotilde García Picossi. Clotilde, one of Federico’s favorite cousins, would soon after become the owner of the place that gave its name to Lorca’s last book, Divan del Tamarit, written from the second half of the 1930s and published posthumously.

Lorca commented in a letter that his cousin’s orchard had one of the most beautiful addresses in the world: Huerta del Tamarit, term of Fargüi, Granada. “Cousin,” Federico told Clotilde, “your farmhouse is a collection of postcards.”

In 1918, Don Federico had not yet conceived the idea of interrupting the periodic stays in the house of Asquerosa (Disgusting), coinciding with the threshing season, and acquiring a country house near Granada, so he let the opportunity pass him by. Francisco García Rodríguez built the main house in 1923 and then a smaller one for the caretakers.

From the purchase of the Huerta de San Vicente, the comings and goings of the family from one estate to another was constant. They were so twinned one property with the other that their cadastral denomination overlapped to the point of creating a nominal misunderstanding. There are those who place the Huerta de San Vicente in the term of Jaragüi or Fargüi, the same as the Huerta del Tamarit, when in fact the first was paid for by Arabial. In any case, the names share the same euphonic beauty with Arabic endings. Lorca commented in a letter that his cousin’s farmhouse had one of the most beautiful addresses in the world: Huerta del Tamarit, term of Fargüi, Granada. Federico used to walk to his cousin Clotilde’s house frequently to savor her ‘arriero’ rice, “Cousin,” Federico told Clotilde, “your farmhouse is a collection of postcards.”

It is difficult to specify which poems of Divan del Tamarit were written in the Huerta de San Vicente and which in the Huerta del Tamarit, especially because the collection, although concentrated in 1934, was composed over a very long period. In the summer of 1931, Lorca had already written the Casida of the Outdoor Dream and the Ghazal of the Bitter Root. On the ship that brought him back from Argentina he wrote at least two more ghazals and a casida. According to his friend Eduardo Blanco-Amor, who resided in the Huerta de San Vicente in the summer of 1934, he saw him writing “in a cafe on Zacatín Street” the Ghazal of the Morning Market.  As Blanco-Amor himself wrote in 1937, trying to settle the ambiguity of the names, “the Huerta del Tamarit was, according to the erudition or imagination of Federico, the Moorish name of the Huerta de San Vicente, shaded by laurels, illuminated by cherry trees and reflected by irrigation channels where the poet spent his summers”.

The construction of the Granada ring road in the eighties divided both estates and turned the entire agricultural area of the Vega into small unconnected islands. San Vicente was integrated into the city and Tamarit on the other side of the highway. Taking the route from one farmhouse to another is now a complicated and even dangerous task due to the traffic and the constant unevenness of the ground. The Huerta del Tamarit is currently privately owned.