At the bottom of La Plaza de Santa Ana in El Barrio de las Letras, Madrid, a statue of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (Fuentevaqueros, 5 June 1898 – camino Víznar a Alfacar, August 19, 1936) can be found.
The statue was cast by the Madrid-born sculptor Julio López Hernández between the years of 1984 and 1986.
On most days the bronze statue can be seen cradling a lark (alondra), a bird that appears in works such as Romance de la Pena Negra (1928), where a lovelorn Soledad Montoya is told to wash her body with “agua de las alondras”, thought to signify the crisp morning dew, as larks are known to sing at daybreak.
The lark, which some people believe is a nightingale (another prominent feature in the artist’s work), has disappeared on two registered occasions, first in Abril of 2011, and on the 1st of August 2022, when it was broken off the statue.
As a result, locals reportedly began to place red carnations in the bronze poet’s empty hands from time to time. Carnations appear regularly in Garcia Lorca’s works, such as Bodas de Sangre (1932) or Blood Wedding:
Acto I, Cuadro 1º
Madre: Cien años que yo viviera no hablaría de otra cosa. Primero, tu padre, que me olía a clavel y lo disfruté tres años escasos.
Act 1, Scene 1
Mother: If I lived to be a hundred I’d speak of nothing else. First your father; to me he smelled like a carnation and I had him barely three years.
Here is another example from the first stanza of his poem Elegía a Doña Juana la Loca (1921):
Princesa enamorada sin ser correspondida.
Clavel rojo en un valle profundo y desolado.
La tumba que te guarda rezuma tu tristeza
a través de los ojos que ha abierto sobre el mármol.
And a translation provided by the actor Alan Wheatley:
Princess whose life was unrequited love.
Oh dark carnation, desolate, alone.
The marbles of your tomb are weeping still
through eyes that grief has opened in the stone.
Often associated with the world of flamenco and popular festivals such as El Día de San Isidro in Madrid, the red carnation, Spain’s national flower, was reportedly brought to the peninsula from Asia by Emperor Charles I as a romantic gesture for his wife, Isabella of Portugal. The flowers were then planted in the gardens of the Alhambra in Granada.
To some, the flower may also allude to the Revolução dos Cravos or The Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, described by The Guardianas “an almost-bloodless coup” that ended “more than 40 years of dictatorship in Portugal” which, according to historian Josep Sánchez Cervelló, was fundamental to the Spanish transition to democracy in 1975.
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