Barranco de Víznar

The French Hispanist Claude Couffon is the only investigator who maintained, until his death in 2013, that Federico García Lorca was murdered and buried in the Barranco de Víznar. Couffon was one of the first investigators to overcome the fear of reprisals of the new regime and climb the Barranco de Víznar in search of evidence of the murders. It was in 1948. “When I was 22 years old, I was quite daring. Nobody wanted to talk in Granada about what had happened. It was dangerous to ask questions and it was impossible to enter Víznar,” he recalled on his last visit to Granada in 2011.

Couffon returned to Granada in 1949 and established new contacts to continue his investigation. “I had access to the right people. For me the investigation was closed. Once I published my first conclusions, hundreds of speculations began to be made. Everyone wrote a different version. There were many myths and many lies.”

Despite the testimonial evidence provided by other investigators, Couffon always defended that Lorca was in the Ravine. “At first the graves were shallow. I could see them, and even touch them. There were about 20. Federico was not in the central pit. He was in a smaller one, possibly in that area. It was easy to recognize them. It was a steep place, all rock, with no trees. Today it’s full of pine trees. Hasn’t anyone thought about that?”

After Couffon in 1948 other investigators, all foreigners, went into the Ravine in search of evidence of the shootings. In 1949, Gerald Brenan, accompanied by his companion Gamel Woolsey, decided to look for Frederico’s grave. He wrote the details of the visit in the book The Face of Spain. Brenan and his companion were helped by an old woman who suggested that the body was not in the cemetery but in the ditches of the Ravine.

In 1960, the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar and her friend Grace Jones visited Víznar, following Lorca’s footsteps. Thanks to two boys from the village who offered to act as guides, they toured the places where the poet was supposedly buried. “If it is the authentic site that they had shown us, it is evident that the murderers made a circuit, completed their crime and erased the tracks in that wasteland before returning to the village by another road with more traffic,” she wrote.

The French Hispanist Marcelle Auclair, personal friend of Lorca and Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, specialist in Santa Teresa, visited Víznar in 1964 where she located the place of death described by Brenan and Couffon. Auclair climbed alone to the Ravine and in 1966 returned accompanied by a very young Ian Gibson who followed the same track. Both investigators shared data that are reflected in the books they published in 1968 (Auclair) and 1971 (Gibson).

Ian Gibson arrived in Granada with his wife in 1965 with the idea of spending a year investigating the death of the poet. The initial contacts were not easy. “Thanks to a small number of friends who had known Lorca intimately, I found a growing number of natives from Granada who had spent the first months of the rebellion in their hometown and were able to give me detailed and verifiable information about the period.” Gibson is the most important biographer of García Lorca to whom he has devoted dozens of books.

The most controversial investigation among the foreigners who went up to Víznar and Alfacar was that of Jean-Lous Schonberg. If on the one hand he was the first to highlight the influence that Lorca’s homosexuality had on the hatred raised among the Granada right wing in 1936, on the other he invented that the poet had been killed in a fight between homosexuals.

The leak in August 2016 of a Francoist Police report dated 1965 brought back the controversy over the burial place of García Lorca to the forefront. Although the report is riddled with questionable statements, as if it were the product of a hasty investigation to comply with some formal bureaucratic requirement, the Regime’s police specify that the grave where the poet was buried is located “about two kilometers to the right” of Aynadamar or the Fountain of Tears, “very deep in the ground, in a ravine, a place that becomes very difficult to locate.” The description contained in the report gave rise to the idea that Lorca was in the Barranco de Víznar. The same document accuses Lorca of supposedly belonging to the Alhambra Masonic Secret Society and accuses them of “homosexual practices, an aberration that became vox populi”.

In early summer 2015, the City Council of Víznar placed a plaque in the main grave of the Barranco de Víznar in which it assures that García Lorca and his companions in the shooting were buried in the grave “2 C” of the five identified, two years earlier, in the surveys of the General Directorate of Democratic Memory.

According to the official report of the archaeologists of 2013, “superimposed skeletal remains of three individuals, in a collective burial of less length than in the adjoining area, specifically with dimensions of 3.00 meters long by 0.50 meters wide by 0.86 meters high”, were identified in grave 2 C.

For the archaeologists, the “most striking” characteristic of this burial was the reduced occupation of the compartment, the compression of the skeletal remains and its location within the perimeter of zone 2 “but outside the northern profile”.

The plaque was mysteriously removed in August 2015 after the archaeologist who directed the excavations declared that there was no evidence that Lorca, the two “banderilleros” and the master of Pulianas had been buried there.