Professor, writer, music critic from Granada and official of the Granada City Council, he belonged to the literary circle of Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla in the 1920s.
Born at the beginning of the century, he was fourteen years old when he was invited to the tertulia in the garden of the Antequeruela House where Manuel de Falla lived. He was one of the youngest along with Enrique Gómez Arboleya. His father was a wealthy exporter of goods and tobacco to Cuba who settled in Granada at the beginning of the 20th century. His mother was Cuban. They lived at first on Reyes Católicos Street, but after an economic crisis and the death of his father they moved to the Albaicín. Luis Jiménez had been a great reader since his childhood. He studied philosophy and was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts in Granada. In addition to Falla, his mentor and teacher was Joaquín Amigo, the professor of Literature and editor of gallo murdered by the Republicans in August 1936 in Ronda (Málaga).
Luis Jiménez met Lorca when he was only seven years old and cultivated their friendship until the years before the Civil War. Lorca used to go to his house where he heard him play Beethoven’s The Pathetique and an arrangement of Wagner on the piano. He attended one of the first readings of Yerma at the house on the Acera del Casino and, in 1934, at the Huerta de san Vicente farmhouse, the reading of The House of Bernarda Alba. According to the testimony collected by Eduardo Molina Fajardo in his book The Last Days of García Lorca, the writer was for the right wing “an illustrious representative of liberalism and, therefore, had to be eliminated”. In the war, he continues, “a right-wing spirit of ecclesiastical triumphalism prevailed. When the Church supported the Movement, it tried to suffocate the whole spirit of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Teaching Institution), with harshness, with terrible intransigence”. “I remember that Falla told me one day in confidence: `Federico is the man with the most personality I have ever known”, he relates in the book.
He belonged to the Ateneo de Granada and also collaborated draughting of the magazine gallo. Lorca affectionately called him ‘Don Luis Pitín’, a nickname by which he was known to his friends. His articles and music reviews can be found in El Defensor de Granada. In 1976, he gave a lecture on Falla entitled My Human Memory of Manuel de Falla which was published in book form.
