Archaeologists hope to uncover playwright García Lorca’s resting place

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/nov/17/spain-archaeology-federico-garcia-lorca-mass-grave

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Spanish authorities are revisiting one of the country’s great mysteries, with the excavation of a mass grave believed to be contain the remains of Federico García Lorca, the executed playwright and poet.

For the next 10 days, a team of archaeologists will home in on 300 sq metres in the hills overlooking the southern city of Granada. It’s there that the author of Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba is believed to have been shot by a right-wing firing squad in 1936.

After years of combing through police and military archives, author Miguel Caballero Pérez flagged the site in his 2011 book piecing together the last 13 hours of Lorca’s life. Last year, a sweep by ground-penetrating radar suggested that a mass grave lay below the surface.

The project, estimated to cost about €15,000 (£12,000), was not only about finding Lorca, stressed Juan Francisco Arenas of the regional government of Andalucía. “There are believed to be some 3,500 missing people buried in the area,” he said. “We’re not just looking for one person, but for all of them.”

The excavation was one of 40 similar projects in the region in recent years, he said: a response to a campaign by victims’ families to find the graves and return the remains of the tens of thousands of civilians executed during General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.

As Lorca was one of the most famous victims of Franco’s nationalist forces, many had pinned high expectations on this search, he said. “But finding Federico Lorca is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Some of those who are believed to be buried in the area included “a rector of a university, two schoolteachers and members of a political party from the Second Republic”, he said. “For us, absolute success would mean finding all of those who are buried here.”

If any remains were detected, he said, it would be up to a court to determine the next steps.

The archaeological survey will take place a few hundred yards outside a park named after Lorca. In the late 1990s, an ambitious mayor sought to turn the park into a football field but was blocked by vigorous protests from Isabel García Lorca, the playwright’s younger sister, then 87. “The fact that it is socialists who authorised the project makes it even worse, as it was there that your fellow party members were killed,” she wrote in a scathing letter to the regional government at the time. “It’s an embarrassment.”

The excavation is the regional government’s second attempt to locate the mass grave where García Lorca is thought to lie. In 2009, the region spent about €70,000 searching a nearby site flagged by a man who claimed to have helped dig the grave into which the author’s body was thrown, but no bones were found.