Juan Ramón Jiménez described it as a ball of sun that fills the entire universe. Roberto Arlt saw in her “a ray of seven thousand colors.” And if the Mexican Francisco de Icaza composed those verses – “Give him alms, woman, / there is nothing in life / like the penalty of being / blind in Granada” -, Jorge Luis Borges answered, already blind, after visiting Nasrid palaces: «Pleasant the voice of the water / who was overwhelmed by black sands». There is no form of beauty that is not manifested in Granada. Already in the verse of the throne of Comares, poetry was sultan in the Nasrid era and in the 15th century Charles V dispatched ambassadors from the Holy Habsburg Empire, papal Italy, the Mediterranean colonies and the newly found America. A young Federico García Lorca cajoled Manuel de Falla to take him to the Plaza de Toqueros. And like them, romantics like Washington Irving or avant-garde artists like Henri Matisse fell in love with its orange blossom and jasmine paving. Granada aspires to be European Cultural Capital 2031 and has been a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) in the Literature category for a decade. After a month writing in the Corrala de Santiago thanks to the Granada International Writers-in-Residence Program – organized by UNESCO, the University of Granada and the City Council – it is clear that there is no cultural centrality. To Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, San Sebastián or Valencia, my respects. But when it comes to Granada, it’s worth taking your hat off. After meeting writers, musicians, booksellers, journalists and managers who make Granada a cultural laboratory, both for the person who signs this column and for the British poet James Womack – with whom I shared the program and visited the archive of the Lorca Center with the help of Laura García Lorca, Jesús Ortega and Miguel Carrera -, Granada has become the axis of our notion of beauty. It shines like a lighthouse, inside and outside the continent. Granada does not opt for cultural capital. It already is, in its own right. You just need to recognize it.
#Karina #Sainz #Borgo #Granada #European #universal
