Illustrious personalities of Granada

Illustrious personalities of Granada

Did you know that Granada is much more than four works of art? This city is the birthplace of Lorca, Cano, Morente... And many more! In ForGranadaLovers we tell you everything and more about the illustrious characters of Granada. Come and meet them!

Illustrious characters in the history of Granada

Below is a small list of characters that have made the history of the city of Granada.

From Enrique Morente (singer) to José Guerrero (famous painter), passing through the history of Mariana Pineda (liberal heroine) and Federico García Lorca (famous poet), to conclude with Alonso Cano (illustrious architect).


Enrique Morente

Born in Granada, he moved to Madrid at the age of 18, where he was known as Enrique El Grananino. In the Spanish capital he collaborated with several important exponents of flamenco: Pepe de la Matrona, Bernardo El de Los Lobitos, Manolo de Huelva and others.

In 1960 he became a professional musician and began a long journey characterized by artistic creativity. He renewed the world of Spanish flamenco with the recording of Homenaje Flamenco a Miguel Hernández.

Jose Guerrero

He was a Spanish painter and engraver, framed in abstract expressionism.

José Guerrero studied with the painters of Granada until 1928. After the war, in 1940, he went to Madrid to study at the San Fernando Academy. Later he moved to Paris (1945), where he became acquainted with the work of the European avant-garde, especially Spanish painters such as Picasso, Miró and Gris.

In November 1949 he moved to the United States. The painter became an American citizen in 1953. After more than 16 years in the United States, he returned to Granada in 1966. Frequent visits were made to Víznar, where Federico García Lorca (his great painting, La brecha de Víznar, was assassinated) in 1966, bears witness).


Mariana Pineda

She went down in history as a liberal heroine.

She was born in 1804 in Granada and died in 1831. Her life coincided with a very turbulent Spanish period. A radical power struggle between liberalism and absolutism. At the age of fifteen Mariana Pineda married Manuel Peralta; three years later she was widowed (1822).

Influenced by her husband's liberal ideas, she immediately distinguished herself for her enthusiasm for freedom, so when Fernando VIII's absolutism was restored in 1823, she was scrupulously controlled by the State.

Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet and playwright. He belonged to the so-called Generation of 27, a group of writers who confronted the European avant-garde with excellent results, so much so that the first half of the twentieth century is defined as the Silver Age of Spanish literature.

García Lorca was shot by militants of the political movement CEDA in the early morning of August 19, 1936 for being a leftist, homosexual and Freemason and thrown into an anonymous grave in Fuentegrande de Alfacar near Víznar, near Granada.

Alonso Cano

He was a Spanish sculptor, architect and painter, one of the greatest Spanish artists of the 17th century.

He trained as a sculptor and architect in the workshop of his father, Miguel Cano, a builder of great altarpieces, and in that of Juan Martínez Montañés; from 1616 he worked in the workshop of Francisco Pacheco in Seville, where he learned the art of painting and was a pupil of Diego Velázquez.


He left Seville in 1638 and, according to Velázquez, was summoned to the court in Madrid, where he took an active part in the pictorial decoration of the royal factories. Accused, in 1644, of killing his own wife, he took refuge in Valencia and became a friar. After obtaining the protection of Felipe IV, he returned to Madrid and assumed the position of superintendent of the Cathedral of Granada.

He designed the triumphal arch to celebrate the entry into Madrid of Maria Ana of Austria, wife of Philip IV, and from 1650 he was the architect of the Cathedral of Toledo. As an architect he introduced in Spain the exuberant style of Portuguese derivation called churrigueresque and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not blindly follow the dictates of the Baroque, but in many cases respected the outlines of the Italian Renaissance.

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