Lorca’s family home in Valderrubio

The García Lorca family moved from Fuente Vaqueros, the village where three of the couple’s children were born (Federico, Francisco and Concha; Isabel would come into the world in Granada in 1909) to Asquerosa (Disgusting) in 1906. They first lived, for a short time, in a house in Ancha Street, next to the parish church, but later moved to a large farmhouse located at 20 Iglesia Street, which became their permanent home until 1908 and then, until 1926, their summer residence. The current House Museum of the poet is a faithful recreation of both the container and the content of the original. To the house has been attached the house of the landlords, a kind of rural museum of the early twentieth century.

The decisive cause of the move from one town to another was of a practical nature: the father of the family, Federico García Rodríguez, had concentrated much of his agricultural business as well as his most valuable assets, in this small village near Fuente Vaqueros of a few hundred inhabitants, an authentic orchard with an unfortunate name resulting from the defective derivation of its authentic and delicate denomination: Aguarosa or Acuerosa (i.e., of abundant waters). Prosperity had come thanks to the purchase, in 1895, of the Daimuz Bajo farmhouse and estate, which included numerous lands that later extended to the Vega de Zujaira, the place where Federico signed many of his youthful poems.

The family’s move to Granada did not interrupt Federico’s relationship with Asquerosa (Disgusting). Every year, when the Corpus Christi festivities ended in Granada, they migrated to the house in Valderrubio where they spent the summer coinciding with the agricultural work.

Although Federico had been born in Fuente Vaqueros eight years earlier, the fundamental experiences of his childhood and adolescence came to life in Asquerosa (Disgusting). There, among poplar groves, sources and rivers, had his “first artistic astonishment”, trained as a musician, groped in literature and wrote the compositions that made up the Book of Poems, Songs and Suites. La Vega’s influence, however, was deeper and more lasting and would appear more or less explicit in Divan del Tamarit. Valderrubio would inspire one of his last plays, The House of Bernarda Alba, based largely on authentic events and characters, which sparked some family clashes, and some scenes from Yerma and Blood Wedding.

Asquerosa (Disgusting), or Valderrubio, was a very important flow in Lorca’s work and, as a whole, in the poet’s attitude in life: “My most distant memories as a child have a taste of land. The earth, the countryside, have done great things in my life. The bugs of the earth, the animals, the peasant people, have suggestions that reach very few. I capture them now with the same spirit of my childhood years,” he confessed in March 1934 to journalist José R. Luna, who interviewed him for the Crítica magazine of Buenos Aires.

The family’s move to Granada in 1908 did not interrupt Federico and his brothers’ relationship with Asquerosa (DIsgusting). Every year, when the Corpus Christi festivities ended in Granada, the family emigrated to the house in Valderrubio where they spent the summer, coinciding with the agricultural work. The seasonal stays were maintained until 1926 when they acquired the Huerta de San Vicente (San Vicente Farmhouse) in Granada.

After a brief stay in Ancha Street, the Lorca family moved to a house that was “large, full of nooks and crannies, with a high step at the entrance” located at Iglesia, 20. According to the memory of Isabel García Lorca the house was “ramshackle, with a patio that separated it from the immense corrals and stables: with a brick bench, a wooden gate painted green, many pots of geraniums and Dom Pedro tulipss, a vine and a huge red oleander”. All the rooms were whitewashed and the ceiling was a deep blue except Federico’s, which was painted violet. The walls were decorated with lithographs of Nordic countries. Those foreign and incongruous landscapes competed on the house walls with a large print of the Christ of the Cloth of Moclín that none of the siblings forgot. Lorca even incorporated the pilgrimage into the final scene of Yerma.

The celebration of Saint Federico was the excuse for large family reunions in Asquerosa (Disgusting) attended by more than forty first cousins, plus their spouses, children, the mothers of the newborns and the chauffeurs who brought them to and from Asquerosa (Disgusting).

The Lorca’s relationship with some neighbors and relatives of Valderrubio was full of misunderstandings and braided by envy and hatred. Disputes over the boundaries of the estates and other controversies clouded the relationship.

Isabel García Lorca has emphasized the singular influence that the games and nursery rhymes heard in Asquerosa (DisgustIng) had on her brother’s early work. In Federico, she writes, the couplets appear as “songs fused in a feeling that he relives in a present that is no longer that of his childhood, enlivening a memory that he now sees as different from the past.” Thus chorus songs like “ there goes my sparrowhawk / with four cat’s claws / If you don’t bring me meat, / I’ll kill you”, are transformed in the poem Sad Ballad into [“as a child I sang like you,] / niños buenos del prado, [good children of the meadow,] / niños buenos del prado, [I released my sparrowhawk with the fearsome] / cuatro uñas de gato” [four cat’s claws”]. Or poems that incorporate part of popular romances, such as the one about Count Laurel: cuatro uñas de gato” [“-Why do you wear a shawl] / cuatro uñas de gato” [black with death?] / -¡Ay!, yo soy la viudita, [- Oh, I am the widow,] / -¡Ay!, yo soy la viudita [sad and without goods,] / -¡Ay!, yo soy la viudita [of the Count of Laurel] / -¡Ay!, yo soy la viudita [of the Laurels”] (Ballad of a Day in July, 1919).

The relationship of the Lorca’s with some neighbors and relatives of Valderrubio was full of misunderstandings and braided by envy and hatred. Disputes over the boundaries of the estates and other controversies clouded the relationship with the family of Horacio Roldán, cousin of the poet and active right-wing militant. Those disputes, after the uprising, turned into persecution. According to the investigator Miguel Caballero, the brothers Miguel and Horacio Roldán participated in two of the groups that broke into the Huerta de San Vicente in August 1936, on the days before the murder of the poet. They were accompanied by José Benavides Peña, Pepe el Romano from The House of Bernarda Alba. One of the individuals who participated in Lorca’s detention at the home of the Rosales family was Juan Luis Trescastro, whose wife was a cousin of the poet. Also on the firing squad was Antonio Benavides Benavides, Trescastro’s buddy, cousin of the Roldán family and grandnephew of Matilde Palacios, the first wife of Lorca’s father, who died prematurely. The House of Bernarda Alba, inspired by the life of Frasquita Alba, also raised strong misgivings as it incorporated the real names of some neighbors in Valderrubio.