Why does the most internationally renowned poet of our language still lie in an unknown grave? How is it possible that, as his anticipatory verses say, almost a century later Lorca whispers "they did not find me"?

On the 90th anniversary of his death, the expert Hispanist Ian Gibson publishes this detailed chronicle that recounts his personal view on the causes, interests, and indifferences that have led to this silence.

Spain still has about 115,000 victims of Francisco Franco's long-lasting and brutal dictatorial regime abandoned in ditches and mass graves. The most loved and mourned of these disappeared is Federico García Lorca, "taken" in August 1936 on the outskirts of Granada at the age of 38. It seems unimaginable that we still do not know, almost a century later, where his mortal remains lie.

This book is a chronicle of that oblivion. In 2010, Ian Gibson published the diary he obsessively wrote during the first and failed official search for the poet the previous year, in the Granada municipality of Alfacar. The first part reproduces that desolate text in full. The second, unpublished, recounts what happened around the investigation during the following fifteen years.

The fact that Granada, expressed by García Lorca with more depth than by any other writer ever, still does not reveal his final whereabouts is shameful. They continue to ignore the request made in his elegy by Antonio Machado, another brilliant Andalusian, a few days after the assassination:

Carve, friends,
of stone and dream, in the Alhambra,
a tomb for the poet,
over a fountain where the water weeps,
and eternally says:
the crime was in Granada, in its Granada!