Federico García Lorca, one of the few authentic poets of our century, was born in June 1898 in the small village of Fuente Vaqueros in Andalusia, about eighteen kilometers northwest of Granada.

His father, a man with liberal principles, was a wealthy landowner in the area. When his first wife died childless, he married a young but knowledgeable and cultured schoolteacher from the village, the daughter of a poor family from Granada. Together they had five children, with Federico being the eldest.

Thus, the future poet, apart from a short period when he was forced to continue his schooling in Almería, spent his childhood in the fertile plain of Granada, a crossroads of so many cultures, with picturesque villages and strange legends, with gypsies and improvised musicians, with illicit loves and violent passions, all of which shaped the sensitivity of the young Andalusian and forever marked the character and texture of his work.

(Excerpt from the translator's note)