New Lorca works emerge: a love letter cut short by Spanish Civil War and an unpublished poem
Scholars keep uncovering works by the Granada-born poet and playwright, shot 90 years ago by Nationalist forces for his politics and sexuality. Two feature films about him will premiere between 2026 and 2027.
Federico García Lorca chose to devote a few minutes to love, writing from his Huerta de San Vicente during the uprising of 18 July 1936, at a time when news of the rebellion that would change Spain's recent history had already spread across the peninsula and would, a month later, condemn to death the most internationally renowned Andalusian poet.
It is believed that the recipient of these lines was Juan Ramírez de Lucas, a journalist and art critic from Albacete. Ramírez de Lucas, who died in 2010 and was then still a student, may have been the lover who inspired Lorca's "Sonnets of Dark Love", although for obvious reasons he remained discreet about this, even after the end of the Franco dictatorship.
The letter between the 38-year-old artist and the student, barely 16, was kept by Ramírez de Lucas for 70 years. Shortly before his death, he handed over to his siblings a collection of drawings, letters and a diary about his relationship with the artist, among which the letter was found. Specialists who examined the material after it was made public in 2012 consider it to be the last letter Lorca wrote before he was arrested and shot somewhere between the municipalities of Víznar and Alfacar, in an as yet unidentified location.
Ninety years have passed since these events, yet manuscripts and works by the Andalusian poet are still being recovered today, even though his body, like that of so many other Spaniards, has still not been found. The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory has recorded more than 3,000 mass graves, in which victims' associations estimate that between 114,000 and 130,000 people lie without having been exhumed.
Another example of this cultural recovery is a poem about time, one of the themes that survives to this day as a Lorca cliché thanks to the version Camarón recorded based on an extract from the play Así que pasen cinco años, which the Javis have now reinterpreted for the trailer of their new feature film inspired by Lorca's story, his lovers and his universe, "La Bola Negra", which recently won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
As well as overseeing the restoration of the house, a Nazarí gem, where the poet lived as a child between 1900 and 1916, on the ground floor of Acera del Darro 50, the flamenco singer Miguel Poveda managed to acquire a manuscript whose reverse bears an unpublished poem by Lorca, whose handwriting has been authenticated by Lorca specialist Pepa Merlo.
Merlo and Poveda have written "Las cosas del otro lado. Lo inédito en Federico García Lorca", published in April this year, to examine the latest discoveries about the artist's literary universe. The book will be added to the catalogue of the new cultural centre reopened in what was once his childhood home.
A second feature film about Lorca, directed by Fernando Franco, is due for release in 2027. It will reconstruct precisely the last weeks of Federico's life: from his flight from Madrid after the uprising to his execution in Granada. We will have to wait a few months to see whether the film devotes a few minutes to paying tribute to the letter he sent to Ramírez de Lucas, which never received a reply.
