Uclés links Granada earthquake to Lorca, whose body remains missing

David Uclés blames the Granada earthquake on the memory of Lorca, and the controversy reverberates

Can an earthquake be to blame for the fact that Federico García Lorca still has not been found? The Spanish writer David Uclés has answered yes: the earth trembles because the poet "still lies within" and cannot be found. The remark, made after the earthquake that shook Granada, has triggered a dialectical landslide. Some see it as a brutally effective metaphor; many read it as the latest piece of a public narrative that needs no more mud.

A remark that splits the map of memory

Critics were quick to dismiss the phrase as frivolous. "A lack of respect for people who have lost their homes," sums up one of the harshest reactions. Others point to the character: a writer with a beret and a neo-rural aesthetic who "plays a role" and has discovered that controversy over the Civil War pays better than poetry. On the opposite side are those who value that Uclés has put the focus where it hurts: the documents remain unclassified and Lorca's body still has not appeared, 90 years after his execution. That reading defends that the seismic metaphor is not nonsense, but a complaint about the "ominous shame of a country."

The family's theory and the hole in memory

Beneath the layer of political insults, the exchange has brought to light an uncomfortable thesis: that Lorca's remains are not in the Víznar mass grave because the family exhumed them a few days after the murder and took them to a private cemetery. According to that version, the silence was maintained during the Franco regime, continued through the Transition, and the family still has not denied that the body is elsewhere. It is a hypothesis, but it would explain the fruitless excavations and the public money invested in the search. The anecdote circulating as fuel: the poet went out to buy his brand of cigarettes, Lucky Strike, was recognized by some cousins who had sworn to have him publish characters from "The House of Bernarda Alba," and that sealed his fate.

From execution to spectacle: Lorca as a stage

The noise goes beyond the causes of the earthquake. Several analyses argue that Lorca's figure has become a homegrown "industry plant": a political wildcard brought out to cover up disunity, turning the poet into a banner for ideologies that Lorca himself would have disputed. Lists of intellectuals executed on both sides are read out, Ramiro de Maeztu or Joaquín Amigo are rescued from obscurity, and it is recalled that Lorca was a friend of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The figures cited on violence before the Civil War also appear in the fray: 196 dead in 1931, 1,457 in 1934 and more than 1,300 in the Asturias revolution. The result is a carousel of totems where data bends to narrative. When the guts tremble, everyone knows: it is memory refusing to be buried. Or simply an earthquake that needs no poets to explain it.