Granada, still and fine, girded by its mountains and definitively anchored, seeks its horizons for itself, takes pleasure in its little jewels and offers in its dull diminutive language , its diminutive without rhythm and almost without grace, if compared to dance. phonetic of Malaga and Seville, but cordial, domestic, endearing. Diminutive scared like a bird, which opens secret chambers of feeling and reveals the most defined nuance of the city (…).
Granada cannot leave her house. It is not like the other cities that are on the shore of the sea or the great rivers, that travel and return enriched with what they have seen. Granada, solitary and pure, shrinks, girdles its extraordinary soul and has no other outlet than its high natural position of stars. For this reason, because she does not have a thirst for adventure, she bends over on herself and uses the diminutive to collect her imagination, as she collects her body to avoid excessive flight and soberly harmonize her interior architectures with the lively architectures of the city.
That is why the genuine aesthetics of Granada is the aesthetics of the diminutive, the aesthetics of tiny things.
The just creations of Granada are the dressing room and the belvedere of beautiful and reduced proportions. As well as the small garden and the small statue (…).
The Granada-born man is surrounded by the most splendid nature, but he does not go to it. The landscapes are extraordinary; but the man from Granada prefers to look at them from his window. He is frightened by the elements and despises the vulgar voyeur, who is nowhere. Since he is a man of fantasy, he is naturally not a man of value. He prefers the soft and cold air of his snow to the terrible and harsh wind heard in Ronda, for example, and he is willing to put his soul in diminutive and bring the world into his room. He wisely realizes that this way he can understand better. He renounces adventure, travel, external curiosities; more often than not he renounces luxury, clothes, the city. He despises all this and adorns his garden. He is withdrawn. He is a man of few friends. (Isn’t the reserve of Granada proverbial in Andalusia?).
Everything has by force a sweet domestic air; but, really, who penetrates this intimacy? That is why, when in the seventeenth century a poet from Granada, Don Pedro Soto de Rojas, returning from Madrid, full of sorrow and disappointment, wrote these words on the cover of one of his books: “Paradise closed to many, open gardens for few”, he is making, in my opinion, the most accurate definition of Granada: Paradise closed to many.