We return now to Pinos Puente on our way to Granada. Pinos Puente is named after the vicegothic bridge that crosses the River Cubillas and around which the town was built. The bridge was a strategic point on the way to Córdoba. It was at this bridge that Queen Isabel’s messengers caught up with Christopher Columbus to tell him that she had changed her mind and that she would after all finance his voyage in search of the Western route to the Indies.

This village was also the home of two more candidates for the role of prototype for the spinster character “Doña Rosita”. (Cousin Clotilde is the main contender.) They were freinds of José Mora Guarnido’s family, who were themselves from Pinos Puente.

One was María Sánchez. She was about 50 when José and Federico used to go and visit her and outwardly bore no scars of her private tragedy. It was as if, when many years previously they had brought her fiancé, who had fallen from a horse, to die in her arms , she swallowed in one glass all the bitterness of life and dedicated herself from that moment on to a quiet life of voluntary loneliness. She was as cheerful and affectionate as a girl, graceful in her gestures and ladylike in her manners. (Says José Mora.)

Amparo Medina, on the other hand, suffered cruelly from a sterile relationship, in which a egoistic and indesicive fiancé put off the day of the wedding from one year to the next under some vain pretext. Her love affair was sadder and more unfortunate than Doña Rosita’s, for in the end, she didn’t even have the satisfaction of proud defiance, but she let her youth go to waste, waiting in vain until it was too late, there was nothing left to wait for.

In Libro de poemas Lorca includes an elegy to such women:
 

Eres el espejo de una Andalucía que sufre pasiones gigantes y calla, pasiones mecidas por los abanicos y por las mantillas sobre las gargantuas que tienen temblores de sangre, de nieve, y arañazos rojos hechos por miradas.

You are the mirror of an Andalusia which bears gigantic passions yet remains silent, passions swayed by fans and by mantilla shawls around throats with tremors of blood, of snow, and red scratches that sharp looks have made.

 

Returning now to Granada, we pass, on our right, the Nuevo Rosario sugar refinery in which Don Federico, the poet's father, had a number of shares, and three kilometres later, on our left, La Vega refinery built in 1904. With these last reminders of the sugar beet boom of the first decades of the Twentieth Century without which Lorca's work may not have been possible, we conclude this tour of the Vega of Granada and its significance in the life and work of one of the Spanish language's greatest poets. I hope you enjoyed it.

  return to the map.