The San Pascual refinery on the Vega de Zujaira, which we see in this photo, was one of five sugar refineries built in the first decades of the twentieth century on the Vega of Granada. Don Federico, Lorca's father, was the major shareholder, it being mainly his sugar beet that the refinery processed.
The sugar beet boom had really got underway after 1898 with the loss of the last Spanish colonies, including the Spanish Antillas and access to cheap sugar cane. For Granada it meant the beginning of a Golden Age of sugar production which lasted until the 1930s.
In 1910, when the San Pascual refinery started production, Don Federico was one of the most important employers of labour on the Vega. He employed a lot of men on the land as well as a lot of women as domestic servants. Apart from his permanent employees, he employed 50 men on a part-time seasonal basis and another 20 day labourers. They said he had the same amount of staff as the Casa Grande, where the administrator of the Soto de Roma estate lived.(For an explanation of Soto de Roma you'll have to return to Romilla.)
Don Federico owned all the land adjacent to the sugar refinery in the Vega de Zujaira, as well as a lot of land between River Cubillas and Valderrubio and at Daimuz. All this land was inherited from or bought with the money that Matilde Palacios brought into the marriage and left to her husband, when she died in 1894.
At San Pascual there was a railway station to transport the
sugar produced at the refinery. Here Federico's summer visitors would alight.
Six of the poems of Libro de poemas were dated at the Vega de Zujaira,
including "Madrigal de verano", written in august 1920, and which starts.
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Moclín, where the romería de los cabrones (festival
of the cuckolds) takes place and which Yerma visits to seek a cure for her sterility.
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