Seville, (EFE).- The poet from Granada Federico García Lorca is the author most used in the names of educational centers in Andalusia since he appears in up to 38 schools, institutes and nursery schools, nine of them in the province of Granada, including Fuente Vaqueros, his hometown.
According to a note from the Junta de Andalucía, Andalusian educational centers usually bear in their names the names of people who stand out for their contribution in the social, political, scientific, educational, artistic and also literary spheres and there are many, in this last field, “the unbeatable poets, the long-winded novelists and the irredeemable playwrights”.
In such a way that, on the occasion of Book Day, a history of Spanish literature could be built through the names of the 7,193 existing centers in Andalusia. From Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, to Elvira Lindo; from Fernando de Herrera to Elena Martín Vivaldi or from Santa Teresa de Jesús to Miguel Romero Esteo.
García Lorca is closely followed by Miguel de Cervantes, who spent more than a decade of his eventful life in Andalusia as a tax collector and has 35 centers named after him.
García Lorca in the centers of Seville
Some of these centers are located in cities where he lived (Seville), in the towns he visited as “royal commissioner of supplies” (Carmona) or that appear in one of his works, such as the Seville municipality of Castilblanco de los Arroyos, quoted in ‘The two maidens’, one of the ‘Exemplary Novels’ of the Alcala writer.
Widely represented in this gazetteer is the Sevillian poet Antonio Machado, one of the most emblematic members of the Generation of ’98, who has his name in 25 educational centers in Andalusia. His brother Manuel de él, on the other hand, only names one, while with the name ‘Hermanos Machado’ there are three in the autonomous community.
The two Nobel Prize-winning authors from Andalusia also have a place and thus, eleven centers bear the name of Vicente Aleixandre and sixteen pay tribute to Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Curiously, one of the characters created by the poet from Moguer, Platero the donkey, is present in thirteen centers, most of them nursery schools and schools.
It is not usual for a character or a title of a literary work to give a name to an educational center, although the Permanent Education section of Doña Mencía is called ‘Juanita la Larga’, the novel that Juan Valera published in 1896 about to the love affair of a wealthy man with a young girl set in a Cordoba town that some experts identify with the aforementioned municipality.
Andalusian poets
The two Andalusian poets recognized with the Swedish Academy prize are joined by the novelists Camilo José Cela and Mario Vargas Llosa, awarded in 1989 and 2010 respectively: the Campillos Institute (Málaga) bears the name of the author of ‘La colmena’ , while a school in Marbella recognizes the Spanish-Peruvian writer.
Regarding female writers, María Zambrano names thirteen centers and Carmen de Burgos four, but Gloria Fuertes ‘wins’, widely represented among nursery schools, with a total of 24, while the names of Concepción de Estevarena, Blanca de los Ríos, Celia Viñas, Fanny Rubio, Carmen Martín Gaite and Fernán Caballero (male pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber), among others.
In the same way, there are names of Spanish letters from all periods (Lope de Vega, Góngora, Quevedo, Calderón, Galdós, Bécquer, Valle-Inclán, Alberti, Cernuda and Juan Goytisolo, among them) and others that “history it has bordered on its margins”, like Beatriz Galindo, ‘La Latina’, the humanist who took care of the education of Isabel la Católica.
Finally, foreign authors also have a place in this literary catalogue, often due to their close ties to Andalusia, such as Gerald Brenan and José Saramago, and other times because they are “an indisputable name” within children’s literature, such as the Danish Hans Christian Andersen, author of stories such as ‘The Ugly Duckling’ or ‘The Little Mermaid’, which gives its name to a school in Malaga. EFE
The entry García Lorca, the most common author in the names of Andalusian educational centers was first published in EFE Noticias.