CADAQUÉS, FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA & SALVADOR DALÍ

Salvador Dalí & Federico García Lorca

After visiting Mayte in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, The Grandma has continued her tour across Girona counties. Today, she has visited Figueres, the capital of Alt Empordà with Jordi Santanyí. Figueres is the city where Salvador Dalí located his own museum and they want to visit it. Later, they have visited Cadaqués, one of the most beautiful towns of the Costa Brava.

Salvador Dalí was a closer friend of Federico García Lorca one of the greatest poets of the Generation of '27, a poet who was killed by the Spanish fascists on a day like today in 1936. The Grandma wants to remember the friendship between Lorca and Dalí and she also wants to homage this exceptional poet whose body is still buried in somewhere of the Andalusian lands, in the same way that more than 120.000 people are still waiting to be found, to be dug, to be identified and to be recognized as a victims of the fascism. Their descendents and the UNO reclaim it constantly and it is a human right and a debt with the historic memory.

Jordi has explained lots of new information to The Grandma about the friendship between Lorca and Dalí and how this friendship influenced their writings and paintings.

Before arriving to Figueres, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 13. Images, diagrams and titles (I) (Spanish Version)

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898-19 August 1936), known as Federico García Lorca was an Andalusian poet, playwright, and theatre director.

García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements -such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism- into Spanish literature. He was executed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body has never been found.

García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town 17 km west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a prosperous landowner with a farm in the fertile vega -valley- surrounding Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. García Rodríguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry.

More information: Poetry Foundation

At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, García Lorca befriended Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and many other creative artists who were, or would become, influential across Spain. He was taken under the wing of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, becoming close to playwright Eduardo Marquina and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava.

From 1925 to 1928, he was passionately involved with Dalí. Although Dalí's friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, Dalí rejected the erotic advances of the poet. With the success of Gypsy Ballads, came an estrangement from Dalí and the breakdown of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo. 

Federico García Lorca & Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués

These brought on an increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over his homosexuality. He felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could acknowledge only in private.

He also had the sense that he was being pigeon-holed as a gypsy poet. He wrote: The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I'm not. I don't want to be typecast.

Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself. At this time Dalí also met his future wife Gala. Aware of these problems -though not perhaps of their causes-, García Lorca's family arranged for him to make a lengthy visit to the United States in 1929–30.

More information: The Culture Trip

Cadaqués is a town in the Alt Empordà comarca, in the province of Girona, Catalonia. It is on a bay in the middle of the Cap de Creus peninsula, near Cap de Creus cape, on the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean. It is two-and-a-quarter-hour drive from Barcelona, and thus it is accessible not only to tourists but also to people who want a second home for weekends and summers.

In 2002, Cadaqués had an official population of 2,612, but up to ten times as many people can live in the town during the peak of the summer tourism season.

Cadaqués has a special place in art history. Commanding charcoals, by local artist Eliseu Meifrèn, of the 19th century Cadaqués beleaguered by a winter tramontane, can be seen at the Cadaqués museum. Fren was the first modern artist to live in Cadaqués and gave the town many of his works and a marble top table on which he sketched many of its turn-of-the-century fishermen.

Salvador Dalí often visited Cadaqués in his childhood, and later kept a home in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town. A summer holiday here in 1916, spent with the family of Ramon Pichot is seen as especially important to Dalí's artistic career.

Other notable artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Antoni Pitxot, Henri-François Rey, Melina Mercouri and Maurice Boitel also spent time here. Cadaqués is mentioned in the story Tramontana by Gabriel García Márquez.

The interesting submarine life of this sleepy fishing village was studied for several years by phycologist Françoise Ardré, long before Cadaqués was discovered and transformed into a tourism destination. 

More informació: Visit Cadaqués

Cadaqués, en el fiel del agua y la colina,

eleva escalinatas y oculta caracolas.

Las flautas de madera pacifican el aire.

Un viejo dios silvestre da frutas a los niños.

Cadaqués, at the fulcrum of water and hill,

lifts flights of stairs and hides seashells.

Wooden flutes pacify the air.

An ancient woodland god gives the children fruit.

Federico García Lorca