Teacher and director of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (Sacred Heart of Jesus) secular school , a private high school attended by Francisco and Federico García Lorca when they arrived in Granada in 1909. Joaquín Alemán was a distant relative of Vicenta Lorca. He appears as García Lorca’s tutor in the enrollment applications and other formalities addressed to the General and Technical College. For five years, the two brothers attended high school alternating official classes at the General and Technical College with reinforcement classes at the Sagrado Corazón. The building is of typical Granada architecture. The courtyard with its columns, the fountain and the pillar are preserved. Today it has several remodeled floors. It is located in Castillejos square, near the cathedral and the university, on San Jerónimo street.
He appears as García Lorca’s tutor in the enrollment applications and other formalities addressed to the General and Technical College.
The teachers on the roster at Joaquín Alemán’s school seem chosen less for their knowledge than for their eccentricity so much so that, many years later, the poet and playwright turned some of them into characters in Doña Rosita the Spinster or the Language of Flowers. Francisco García Lorca remembers a handful of them: Benito Campoy, the mathematics teacher, who “was always poking his eyes with a handkerchief, as they were always red” and who, according to legend, “exercised police functions in the city”, perhaps of an administrative nature. He also had “a great capacity as a hypnotist”. No less surprising was Manuel Consuegra, the Latin teacher, who finished off his academic comments with bullfighting interjections and whose superstitious nature also makes him appear in Doña Rosita the Spinster.
And no less memorable was an intern nicknamed Canito, who was the target of the cruelest jokes. Although the most interesting of all was Martín Sherof y Avi, in charge of Literature and Precepts, Federico’s favorite teacher who also appears in Doña Rosita the Spinster. Under his real name and who in real life was a failed writer who worked as a theater critic and poet.
