Mother of the Rosales Camacho brothers, some of whom tried to save the life of Federico García Lorca in the tragic summer of 1936. She was married to Miguel Rosales Vallecillos, a well-known merchant in Granada who ran the shop La Esperanza, located in Bib-Rambla Square. They had eight children: Miguel (1904-1976), Esperanza (1906-1998), Antonio (1908-1958), Luis (1910-1998), José (1911-1992), Carlos (1912-1914), Gerardo (1915-1968) and María (1916-2005).
It was Esperanza Camacho Corona who opened the door when Ramón Ruiz Alonso and his companions appeared before her on the afternoon of August 16, 1936 with the intention of arresting Federico.
While the father, according to Luis Rosales himself, had a more liberal ideology, “liberal conservative” he says, the mother was more supportive of her sons’ militancy in the Falange. He belonged to a very conservative family from Madrid, among whose members was the former Deputy Director General of the Treasury, the poet Antonio Corona Camacho. The Angulo 1 Street, where Federico García Lorca took refuge before being arrested, was the family home, where the Rosales family lived in 1936.
According to the testimonies collected by Eduardo Molina Fajardo in The Last Days of García Lorca, it was Esperanza Camacho Corona who opened the door when Ramón Ruiz Alonso and his companions appeared before her on the afternoon of August 16, 1936 with the intention of arresting him. She was the one to whom Luis Rosales dedicated his elegy The Content of the Heart, published in 1969, a book of prose poems containing biographical passages of great intensity: “I had always loved my father more than her. And one day I remember him telling me so in that [sewing] room without so much as a word. Then she continued sewing. Then everything changed. The volume contains successive portraits of the mother: “She was small like a charm, and she always dressed the same way, she dressed as if praying, just as a sacristan lip stumbles and stumbles over the same word,” wrote her son Luis.
The last stage of Esperanza’s life was marked by the tears caused by the Civil War. A kidney disease, coupled with the hardships experienced during that war, consumed her strength. She wrote her will in the summer of 1939 and died of a heart ailment on January 17, 1941, at the age of 65. A few days later her husband, Miguel Rosales Vallecillos, also died. “After five sleepless nights, sitting in an armchair, he asked his children to prepare the matrimonial bedroom where he had watched over his wife’s body. He never woke up, he died at two in the morning,” writes his grandson José Carlos Rosales. Before that, he asked his son Luis to write a book about his mother.
In the prolog to The Content of the Heart (1969) Luis Rosales noted: “This book was the fulfillment of a promise. I ask forgiveness, to whomever I must ask it, for having taken so long to write it.”
