From his birth to his brutal death 37 years later, the region of Granada was the setting for Federico Garc∅a Lorca's own dramatic story and for most of his writing. While his poetry is full of its landscape and atmosphere, his plays are largely populated by the people among whom he spent his childhood and youth. "If God continues to help me and one day I become really famous, half the celebrity will be due to Granada," he said as a young man.
The town where Lorca was born, Fuente Vaqueros, is 18 kilometres from the city on the plain which surrounds it. The place is now something of a shrine to the poet's memory, after years in which the guilt the Fascists bore for his death - he was shot in 1936, in the early months of the Spanish Civil War - meant that his name was not one to be uttered freely in Franco's Spain.
His birthplace now hosts the Lorca Museum and, straight opposite, there is a newly opened theatre named after him. Shops sell memorabilia, including photographs of the writer with the great friends of his youth, Salvador Dal∅ and Luis Bunuel. Recordings of the folk tunes he composed on the piano are also available.
Lorca's family was one of the richest in the village and his first home, which houses the museum, although modest, suggests a privileged childhood. In his bedroom, his dark wooden babywalker stands next to a brass crib; in the living-room is the piano on which he was to become so adept.
In the loft (the former granary), under a sloping roof, there is an exhibition of photographs, posters and other images of Lorca with family, friends and theatre colleagues. The house has a central whitewashed courtyard, cool and peaceful, with a well, potted plants and a bust of Lorca.
In the building where the animals were kept, you can see footage of the writer at work with his touring theatre company, La Barraca, in the 1930s. Lorca made a strong impression on people; he had the gift, as his brother Francisco said, of "enlivening things by his presence, of making them more intense". Dal∅, for one, was haunted all his life by the absence of his youthful friend, whose image can be seen in many of his paintings.
The rituals of the church in a nearby street had their effect on his childhood games, which included "saying Mass". This involved dressing up in makeshift regalia and pressganging the whole household into service as a congregation before subjecting them to his eloquence. None of his audience were allowed to leave until they had wept real tears at the power of the future poet's sermon.
When he was seven, Lorca's family moved to the next village, Asquerosa, famous for nothing except its unfortunate name, which translates as "Disgusting". In the 1940s, the town ceremoniously renamed itself Valderrubio and tried to erase its previous identity which nonetheless, because of Lorca, is still remembered. "Disgusting" is a five-minute drive through a grove of poplars from Fuente Vaqueros and, again, the Lorcas' house is one of the more prominent. Immediately opposite is the former home of the Alba family, with its tyrannical matriarch whose name Lorca imported straight into his most famous tragedy, The House of Bernarda Alba.
Granada "yearns for the sea", in Lorca's phrase, and the region he loved was also associated in his mind with the enclosure and frustration that he explored in his dramas of unfulfilment. He accused Granada's bourgeoisie of being the worst in Spain and, in the end, these were the people that betrayed him - as much, by some accounts, because of his homosexuality as his politics. He was thrown into an unmarked grave and the details of his final days were not pieced together for years.
After being silenced for so long, his words and story have become available again to Spaniards. He is a mirror in which modern Spain can see itself - imaginative, dynamic, individualist yet traditionalist, sexually liberated - a victim of a tragic shared history now restored to prominence.
Ian Gibson's detailed book, Lorca's Granada: A Practical Guide (Faber & Faber, 1992), is recommended reading for anyone interested in tracing the terrain