History

See also: History with AIDS, Lesbians at Pride

An annotated edition of Las Siete Partidas by Gregorio López was published in Salamanca in 1555. Later that year, the edition received legitimacy by royal decree on 7 September 1555. Another printing of this edition took place in Madrid in 1611. In this edition of Las siete partidas, he said that women could be charged with sodomy, “The same crime [sodomy] can be committed by women … The women who commit said crime should be thrown into the fire, according to the royal decree of the Catholic kings.” He also argued that women who used a dildo should be given death sentences. Elsewhere, López makes clear that female sodomy was less offensive in Spanish law and society than male sodomy. pecado nefando was the legal term of choice in these documents. Ostensibly referring only to anal sex, it was often used as legal shorthand for any form of male or female homosexuality.

Homes for repentant women had begun to be established by the 1300s in Spain. Intended to “free” women from prostitution, they would have a number of rules that appeared to explicitly stop lesbian or lesbian like activities including prohibitions against sleeping in the same bed, hugging each other, joining faces or falling into the sin of sensuality. These institutions were created a long period, known formally as correctional monasteries, continued to be founded until as late as 1792 in Málaga.

María Josefa Massanés y Dalmau moved to Madrid in 1843 after getting married. She quickly got an appointment as a faculty of the literature section of the Liceo Artístico-Literario de Madrid. The following year, as her fame and acclaim grew, she returned to Barcelona where she continued to publish. Massanés is a Catalan Romantic poet and novelist who belonged to the Hermandad Lírica, a group of female poets who wrote about women’s issues of the time and whose work often had homoerotic and lesbian themes. Massanés was the leader of the Catalan group, while Carolina Coronado led the Spanish speaking group. She is considered one of the most important Catalan poets.

Gay male homosexual culture already existed in Madrid and Barcelona in 1874, and Alfonso XIII offered little opposition to this. Little evidence exists though to suggest a similar culture for lesbians in either city, let alone a lack of opposition to it.

Men in the Spanish Restoration period between 1874 and 1931 sometimes wrote about lesbians in fiction.La mala vida en Madrid: estudio psico-sociológico was a book by Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós that was first published in 1901. The book discussed lesbianism. Del jardín del amor by José María Llanas Aguilaniedo published in 1902 in Madrid featured a lesbian protagonist named María de los Ángeles Pacheco, who would represent a new type of female heroine in Spanish literature of the day. Some of his work drew inspiration from the works of French writer Pierre Louÿs and his stories like Les chansons de Bilitis published in 1894.

Around 1886, Marcela Gracias Ibeas was forced by her father to Madrid to complete her studies to become a teach as part of her father’s efforts to separate her from Elisa Sánchez Loriga and the potential scandal their intimate friendship might bring. Gracias attended the Escuela Normal in the city for four months, finishing her training and then returning to Galicia.

In August 1901, Carmen de Burgos left her husband; she took her daughter María de los Dolores Ramona Isabel Álvarez de Burgos, who was born in 1895, to live in Madrid. Her early time in the city was spent in the home of her uncle Senator Agustín de Burgos y Cañizares. After disagreements with him, she moved out. By 1903, de Burgos would become the first recognized female journalist in Spain, working for the Madrid based Diario Universal. Writing as a columnist, she campaigned for a number of feminist issues, including the legalization of divorce. She left Madrid in 1905, traveling to France, Italy and Monaco to study how the educational systems worked in those countries.

Dr. L. Crocq published a medical journal article in Belgium’s Le Progrés Medical Belge that was reviewed by the Madrid based publication Revista de especialidades médicas in 1908 that said there were two types of lesbians. The first were the invertidas verdaderas or true inverts also known as bolleras pata negra and lesbians who are viciosas, that is women who chose to have sex with other women to annoy and offend people; the second type were not lesbians so much as heterosexuals engaging in deliberately destructive behavior.

By the late 1910s and early 1920s, middle class and upper-class lesbians had begun to form their own intellectual circles for socialization, both in Madrid and in Barcelona. The Madrid group included Carmen Conde, Victorina Durán, Irene Polo and Lucía Sánchez Saornil. The Barcelona group included Ana María Martínez Sagi and Carmen Tórtola Valencia. In the mid-1920s and early 1930s, the Madrid group included Marisa Roësset, Victoria Kent, Carmen de Burgos, Irene Polo, Carmen Conde, Matilde Ras and Elena Fortún.

The Lyceum Club Femenino de Madrid was founded in 1926 by María de Maeztu as a place where women could meet, socialize, express opinions, engage in activism and start to mobilize for the broader rights of women. It was modeled after the Lyceum Club founded in London in 1903. The organization would soon attract some of the most prominent lesbians of the period, of the Second Republic and Spanish Civil War. These women included Margarita Xirgu, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Irene Polo and Carmen de Burgos. The Lyceum Club faced opposition from many on the right including the Catholic Church and Falangists, along with left leaning male intellectuals. Lesbians in the club often presented themselves to society as heterosexuals to avoid discrimination, repression and imprisonment for their orientations. There were a few women who defied this, including Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Irene Polo who were both visibly out lesbians in this period.

Liga española por la reforma sexual was founded in 1932 in Madrid, with Gregorio Marañón as its president and Hildegart Rodríguez as its secretary. Its founding was inspired by a comparable German organization. This was the first homosexual rights organization founded in Spain, and it remained socially conservative despite its goals which excluded advocating for homosexual rights. This was in part because homosexuality remained a taboo subject in Spain until the Civil War.

Anarchist movements often had strong historical ties to gay and lesbian communities across Europe dating back to the late 1890s in places like Germany and Ireland. The explicit queer anarchist movement was created in parallel to this movement, with a goal of using social revolution and anarchism to combat homophobia, heterosexism, patriarchy and sexism. In this early period, it was mostly led by affluent or educated gay men, with the notable exception of Emma Goldman in the United States. It would not be until the 1930s, with the freedoms of the Second Spanish Republic, that queer anarchism would gain traction in Spain, and like the USA be led by a woman, Lucía Sánchez Saornil in Spain and Emma Goldman in the United States.

At the start of the Civil War, a number of famous lesbians were in the city, and would remain so for its initial period. Among them was Elena Fortún, alone as her husband had gone to Barcelona to enlist and her son was based in Albacete. The publishing of her stories had been interrupted by the war, but Fortún continued to publish as the war got further underway. Soon this proved untenable as she witnessed the horrors of war on both children and animals, writing articles in support of people aiding in their general welfare.

By 1939, the situation in Madrid had deteriorated badly and Elena Fortún was living in Barcelona. She traveled to Madrid to personally hand over to her new Celia story, Celia madrecita. On the trip back, she got caught on as Franco’s forces had overrun Barcelona and had surrounded Madrid. This left her alone and isolated in Spain.

Elena Fortún departed Madrid for Valencia, and on 18 March 1939 she left on an old rusted ship headed for france; Fortún left despite her own internal conflicts on the right decision and despite her publisher’s desire she stay in the city and continue writing.

The Lyceum Club Femenino was continuing its activities, though covertly and unofficially, in Madrid in 1948. Elena Fortún, visiting the city in an effort to seek amnesty from the Franco regime for her husband, reconnected with her friends from the group. Despite the joy in reconnecting with lost friends, Fortún was depressed as so much in Madrid had changed and she had not been an active participant in that change. Her husband committed suicide a few months later, with Fortún moving to the United States with her son. She returned to Madrid soon after, and died in the city on 8 May 1952.

The literary culture of Spanish cafes continued for a while in the Francoist period. These played an important role in allowing lesbian writers who remained in Spain or who came of age in the early Francoist period like Gloria Fuertes an important place to perform their work, to get recognition and to used heavily coded language to criticize the regime even if these lesbians needed to remain heavily closeted. This practice ended though in the mid-1950s when Franco banned veladas literarias in cafes.

For lesbians of the 1970s, Madrid was not a place where many could be open about their sexuality. Many were living clandestine lives. Bars that attracted lesbians tended to be real ghettos. One of the earliest lesbian friendly bars in Madrid at the time first required patrons to pass through an American bar in front of it. The interiors of these bars tend to be dark and ugly. Only in the 1980s did lesbian bars begin to change, to be more light, open, dignified spaces for lesbians to meet.

LGBT activist organizations in Madrid came out of the communist community, integrating their Marxist ideology into their activism. Armanda Klein, a member of the community party, was one of the main people bringing this into the movement in the early 1970s.

A national women’s handball competition league was organized in 1973 by Medina section of Sección Femenina.  Among the towns and teams competing were A Coruña, Castellón, Gipuzkoa, Málaga, Santander, Valencia, Zaragoza and Atlético Madrid.  While it is unknown if there were lesbians participating in the competition, it is highly probable as Sección Femenina sports were one of the few gender non-conforming regime approved activities available at the time.  For otherwise isolated lesbians, modern researchers believe events like this would have offered opportunities to free themselves of otherwise repressive environments that they may not have had. Unfortunately, sports were a huge financial drain for Sección Femenina and they stopped supporting almost all teams and events in 1974.  This led to a collapse of almost all women’s sports in the country within a few years as teams were unable to find local government support or sponsors.

Lesbian concepts of identity in this period faced another challenge during the Spanish democratic transition period. Spain is made up of multiple cultures including Catalan, Basque and Castilian. These cultures resulted in lesbians inside them creating their own unique subcultures, with practices differing from region to region. Lesbian culture was far from unified.

Vindicacion Feminista was a magazine founded in July 1976 by Carmen Alcalde and Lidia Falcón, and initially printed and sold in Madrid. Over the course of three years, they would produce 29 editions. The feminist publication was one of the more frequent one to address the existence and needs of lesbians. Issue number 22 published on 1 April 1978 and sold for 100 pesetas featured lesbians on the cover, with an article by Regina Bay Falcon.

On the whole, the most politically active homosexuals in the first decade following Franco’s death were gay men, mainly in Madrid, who were often hostile to institutionalized decision-making bodies, and not engaged in institutionalized political discourse.

Enrique Tierno Galván, future mayor of Madrid, said of homosexuals in 1977, “No, I do not think they should be punished. But I am not in favor of granting freedom or propaganda of homosexuality. I think we have to put limits to this type of deviations, when the instinct is so clearly defined in the Western world. The freedom of the instincts is a respectable freedom …, provided that it does not under any circumstances affect models of coexistence mostly accepted as positive moral models.”

International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) announced their plan to hold their meeting in Barcelona in 1980, feminist lesbians took this as a sign to improve their organization. This culminated in the first edition of the Jornadas Estatals de Lesbianas being held in June of that same year. Much of the critique coming out of lesbian feminist circles at that time was the prevailing heterosexism in the feminist movement and about expanding the right to one’s own body on issues like abortion.

Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas de Madrid was created in 1980 at a time when lesbians were beginning to shift away from feminist groups as feminist groups were not considering their needs. Its origins actually date back to 1977 when they were organized more informally. It was cofounded by Empar Pineda Erdozia, Cristina Garaizabal and Montse Oliván almost immediately after Pineda and other lesbian feminists participated in a march down Gran Vía in 1980 in defense of abortion rights following Civil Guard going after women at the Los Naranjos family planning center in Sevilla. The marching women did not have permission, and cut traffic in protest. The event also resulted in the creation of the Comisión Pro Derecho al Aborto. The group was greatly concerned with increasing the visibility of lesbians in western culture and Spanish culture in particular. During the early 1980s, it had at its core membership around 30 to 40 women. At the time, the women faced opposition from other lesbians who did not understand the need to self-organize around sexual orientation. The group soon faced challenges of lesbophobia from feminist groups, and opposition from feminist groups who did not want to address sexual freedom during the Spanish transition period.

Lesbian feminism by the early 1980s in Spain began to speak of specific repression that they faced because their orientation made them sexual minorities; other women did not suffer such specific double repression. The Jornadas de Sexualidad in June 1983 in Madrid were one example of lesbian feminists speaking out on this issue. The Jornada was organized by the Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas. As part of the event, they counted the number of events carried out by feminists more generally in 1975 and 1976 and counted 32 that took on an explicitly heterosexual perspective. The Basque based Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas participated in the the jornada. Citing their document, they said that the feminist movement in Spain had taken a heterosexual trajectory, with earlier works from 1975 and 1976 assuming a heterosexual perspective.

Barcelona hosted a three-day meeting of lesbians in February 1987 to discuss strategies for lesbians from across the country to defend lesbian interests, including fully accepting lesbianism as a normal sexuality. The group wanted to asset their double militancy of its members as both women and as homosexuals. The gathering included lesbian activists from Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, San Sebastián, Vitoria, Pamplona, ​​Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, El Ferrol and Zaragoza.

Jornadas Estatales de Lesbianas took place in 5 June 1988 in Madrid. This supported feminism and lesbian feminism, and was held in coordination with Spanish feminist organizations. Lesbians from the Basque Country attended along with members of the feminist group Matarraskak.

Coordinadora de Frentes de Liberación Homosexual del Estado Español (COFLHEE)’s last major effort on behalf of violence against lesbians was a campaign in 1989 with a motto of “Lesbiana, que no te discriminen” to let lesbians know that the Ley Antidiscriminatoria applied to them. It was also the last major campaign by lesbian feminists in the city, as movement subsequently shifted to focus on marriage equality.

The 1990s saw Spanish lesbian organizations beginning to re-engage with gay men’s political groups, generally around a specific set of issues including combatting AIDS and securing social support services for lesbians and gays. Spanish gay and lesbian political groups also began to more frequently reject radical liberation politics. This was the case with COGAM who rejected the philosophy in 1990, and then split from COFLHEE in 1991. COGAM then began to organize nationally, working on institutional political goals for gays and lesbians. COGAM had its second split in 1996, in the waning days of the González government.

Lesbian demands for marriage equality and partnership rights started to gain visibility and support from within their own communities in 1991. Originating from lesbian feminist groups, a set published their demands that year. Lesbian Feminist Collective of Madrid and National Lesbian Feminist Taskforce published a joint statement titled “Lesbiana que no te discriminen”, which said, “We are not in support of institutionalizing (affection) relationships, but we do not accept the discrimination suffered by those lesbians and gays that would like to marry and cannot do it.” That same year, Revolutionary and Cultural Committee for Lesbians (C.R.E.C.U.L.) became the first group to offer to create a political partnership with Spanish political parties to work on enacting laws to establish lesbian relationship rights. By the following year, lesbian feminists began more concentrated and regular efforts to meet with regional and national political parties to achieve their goal of marriage equality.

The ILGA continued to engage internationally with Spain during the government of Felipe González, hosting a number of meetings and conferences. From 27 – 31 December 1996, Colectivo de Gais y Lesbianas de Madrid (COGAM) hosted the 18th ILGA European Conference in Madrid. Attended by 100 delegates, the meeting saw ILGA-Europe become the official umbrella organization for Europe inside the International Lesbian and Gay Association and formally organized under Belgian law. During the Congress, an action plan was created that was titled “24 ideas for European Commission-led initiatives”. The goal was to get the European Commission to better support gay and lesbian equality.

Editoriales Egales is an LGBT publishing house that was created in November 1995 as a joint venture between two lesbian oriented bookstores, the Madrid based Berkana and the Barcelona based Cómplices. The publisher was created because the bookstores realized there were limited options for young Spanish and Latin American feminists to get published and to get recognized. This was also part of an effort to increase visibility and normalize homosexuality for lesbian and gay readers.

Fundación Triángulo organized the International Festival of Lesbian, Gay and Transexual Cinema in Madrid for the first time in 1996. The festival would go on to play an important role in facilitating social change by normalizing the depictions of lesbians and gays.

The commercialization of Orgullo and the shift towards queer feminism by some lesbians, along with adopting a pro-sex, anti-prohibitionist viewpoint meant the late 1990s and early 2000s were a difficult period for lesbian bolerra militants. These challenges were made even more difficult by the fact that state feminism also started to make the shift from traditional feminism to queer feminism, leaving lesbians without state support and institutional feminism to address their specific needs as women and homosexuals.

During the 1990s, CCOO and UGT, Madrid universities and left wing political parties continued to be heterocentric despite supporting the LGBT community in their platforms. During the late 1990s, they were particularly bad at recognizing the needs of specific groups like lesbians, migrants, incarcerated people and prostitutes. When they did address these topics, they did so from their offices, rarely taking to the streets to support these groups.

The José Maria Aznar period between 1996 and 2004 would see the national influence of smaller, loosely organized LGTB rights in Barcelona begin to fade, and be replaced by national organizations in Madrid. Disconnected groups would become more connected, and, while local activism continued, issues impacting lesbians, gays and bisexuals were often being tackled on a more regional and national level.

cyclobollos was a Madrid based blog created in July 2007. The blog focused on the intersection between bolleras and bikers. The blog later became an organization of the same name, and then transformed again as part of the State Coordinator Con Bici. The group would go on to participate in Orgullo Critico. These sort of intersections were one of the important ways that lesbians continued to organize in the late 2000. Similar groups were formed in Valencia with cyclobollers, in Vitoria with kataliñak bizikletan, with a second group in Madrid called Cicliátric and in Barcelona with bicitetas.

Laura del Río, a member of the Spanish women’s national football team born on 5 February 1982 in Madrid, only came out of the closet officially when she started playing abroad, in the United States for FC Indiana in 2008. This was because she feared the potential impact on her professional career in Spain, as while Spain had progressed on the issue of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality, it still made some people uncomfortable. The media would often focus on it. For del Río, being open about it at times was important, because as an elite football player, she wanted to change people’s attitudes towards the sport and make them stop thinking of it only as a men’s game.

In 2013, women without male partners, namely lesbians and single women, faced the most barriers in trying to access reproductive assistance in Madrid, Asturias and Andalucía. When Paloma Calle and her wife tried to access reproductive assistance in public health in Madrid in 2013 using the Ropa method, they were told it was not possible for lesbians to get this service. The doctor in public health who told them it was not an option also told them that she did not agree with lesbian couples becoming mothers and she also was opposed to abortion. For IVF in general, the women received inferior care compared to a sister going through the process at the same time in public health in Madrid. The couple eventually sought reproductive assistance in private healthcare.

For members of the LGB community from Galicia in 2014 of whom around a quarter were lesbians, the most popular LGB tourist destinations inside Spain the preceding three years were, in descending order, Madrid, Barcelona, Asturias, Ibiza, Castilla y León, País Vasco and Cadiz.  These destinations were largely to places with reputations for being LGB friendly or that were in close proximity to Galicia.

The Comunidad de Madrid’s Consejería de Familia produced a poster in 2016 called “Soy Lesbiana” for institutional distribution.

According to a Observatorio Madrileño contra la homofobia, transfobia y bifobia report, there were 240 LGBT hate crimes with 316 victims in the Comunidad de Madrid in 2016. 93% of the aggressors were men. Gay men were 71% of the victims with lesbians and transwomen the second most with 13% each. Lesbians were one of the groups least likely to report such crimes, with only 18% of victims doing so. That compared with transgender people at 30% and gay men 25%. 185 of the incidents occurred in Madrid capital, with incidents taking place elsewhere as well.

In honor of LGBT Book Day on 1 April 2017, Arcópoli published a study on LGB cultural preferences and experiences in the Comunidad de Madrid. It found among the 18 to 44 year old lesbian, gay and bisexual population, they had more free time than other Madrilños, despite going out to bars, cafes, restaraunts and churches at the same rates as the rest of the region’s population. The LGB population was more likely to go to museums, libraries, bookstores, discotheques and hairdressers than other populations in the city. The LGB community also read way more than the rest of the population and consumed different media than the general population. The LGB community prefered cinema and books more than the general population who prefered television, radio and videos. The LGB community found it difficult to find media in the city to consume that featured LGB themes in books, magazines, radio and teleivision programs, video games, movies and art exhibitions. Books were the most accessible form of media to find representation of LGB communities.

Toxic Lesbian was a project supported by the Ayuntamiento de Madrid in 2017. It was one of 106 public art, education and social mediation projects supported with the goal of preventing homophobia and transphobia.

In 2018, there were 956 same-sex marriages in the community, the second most of any region in Spain that year.

The Comunidad de Madrid saw a drop in the number of LGBT hate incidents in 2019, the first drop in a number of years. The total of 321 incidents was 24 fewer than 2018. Most of the incidents occurred at night, and either at on public thoroughfare or in a habitual residence. 22 of the cases took place on public transport, 6 at religious buildings, 4 at medical centers, 5 at secondary schools and 3 at universities. Most of the incidents were forms of verbal aggression at 83, with 35 involving physical assaults. Of the physical assaults, 12 occurred within a family. 19.4% of the victims were lesbians, the second largest group behind gay men at 68.1%.

The Comunidad de Madrid’s Consejería de Familia produced a report in 2020 called “Estudio sobre las causas de la invisibilidad y la doble discriminación que sufre el colectivo de lesbianas en la Comunidad de Madrid. Resumen ejecutivo” for institutional distribution. The study included transwomen as lesbians, and the trans community made a particular effort to reach out to transwomen who identified as lesbians to be included in the survey. It was also supported by Transexualia, LesWorking, Asociación Fulanita de Tal and Asociación Innicia. Feminist groups, a traditional home to lesbians in Madrid, were not specifically reached out to. The researchers surveyed 204 lesbians living in the region. Homosexuality was mentioned three times in the document. Issues of reproductive healthcare, and particularly fertility treatments and the issues of lesbian mothers, were not mentioned at all. Biological sex is not referred to either, despite a history of repression for lesbians in Madrid being sex based. There was no data table, nor any indication of how many of the 204 lesbians were transwomen, transmen or non-binary.

When Vox entered the regional government in June 2019, they stated their support for ending the ban on conversion therapy for gay and lesbian children, making a push to legalize such efforts. Among the things Vox said around that time was the lesbians were lesbians not because of same-sex attraction but because of a hatred of men, that violence against gays and lesbians is less important than general violence in society, and that gays and lesbians who have children are not creating real families.

Vox leader Santiago Abascal praised a pair of lesbians who participated in a May 2020 protest in Madrid against Pedro Sanchez and the national government’s covid-19 controls. One of the lesbians described herself as a lesbian, an immigrant and a Vox supporter. Año Familia Amoris Laetitia celebrated in Madrid in 2021 by the Catholic Church featured a request by the Delegación de Laicos, Familia y Vida de Madrid to include homosexuals in their midst. In line with this desire, several sessions related to homosexuality were held, including one by Marciano Vidal titled The foundation from the moral theology of spiritual accompaniment of people of diverse sexual orientation on 29 September and another by María Luisa Berzosa on 13 October titled by Welcoming and accompany all diversity in the Church. A third session in November by José María Rodríguez Olaizola was titled Difficult belongings in the Church.

Watch

Mi hija Hildegart is a 1977 Spanish language film that dramatizes the life and death of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, a woman who played an important role in discussing, educating and promoting women’s sexuality in early 1930s Spain.

Hildegart oder Projekt: Superwoman is a 2017 Austrian produced documentry film in the German language about the life of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira and her death at the hands of her mother. It was directed by Barbara Caspar.

Seis Hermanas is a Spanish historical drama set in Madrid that originally ran on RTVE from 2015 to 2017 and is available online. In one episode, the character Celia talks to Carmen de Burgos about lesbian love by telling the story of teachers.

La Coquito is a 1915 erotic comedy novel by male author Joaquín Belda originally published in Madrid that features a lesbian love story. The novel was adapted to a film of the same title in a Spanish-Mexican co-production with its official release in Madrid on 26 December 1977, and in Mexico on 16 November 1978. The novel was republished again in 1995 in Madrid. The film was directed by Pedro Masó. Both were loosely based on the life of Consuelo Portela, a singer born in 1885, though this is never acknowledged by either the author or the film makers. Trailers for the film are available online.

Muchachas de uniforme, in English Girls in Uniform and in German Mädchen in Uniform, is a 1931 German film directed by Leontine Sagan based on a book by Christa Winsloe. It was one of if not the first lesbian themed movies in history. It appeared in Madrid by 1934 on a limited basis. It appred again in Spain at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in August 2015. A remake of the film was produced in 1955, with the film being released in Spain on 31 January 1977 in Madrid and 28 November 1977 in Barcelona.

Pedro Almodóvar’s 1982 Laberinto de pasiones was a screwball comedy that featured a sex addicted pop star in Madrid who has a relationship with the gay son of a leader of a fictional Middle Eastern country. It was celebrated at the time by LGB community as a step towards liberation from the repressive Franco era censorship that saw gays and lesbians condemned and erased.

Ainadamar is an opera by composer Osvaldo Golijov and playwright David Henry Hwang based on the life of Margarita Xirgu Subirá and specifically her friendship with Federico García Lorca. Events in the opera take place in Montevideo, describing events in Madrid, Granada and elsewhere. The actress was Garcia’s muse. A recording of Ainadamar won a pair of Grammy’s in 2007 for Best Opera Recording of 2006, and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The opera has had limited runs in Spain, debuting in the country at the 2011 Festival Internacional de Música y Danza de Granada on the stage of the Teatro del Generalife in Alhambra, in 2012 at the Festival Internacional de Santander, with a limited run at the Teatro Real in July 2012 Madrid, and at the Teatro Campoamore de Oviedo in late 2013.

Eat

A history of gastronomy from the Civil War exists as there were a few anarchist publications, including those of Mujeres Libres, that provided recipes, menus and nutrition advice. Most of these publications were based out of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. One dish was French fries with sautéed in lard with onions and herbs. Another was eel with tomato. A third was egg plant stuffed with meat, garlic and parsley. A fourth was rice with bacalao. A recipe for a vegetable soup included turnips, carrots, onions, green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, noodles, green cabbage and oil.

Routes

• Ruta de Gloria Fuertes: Lavapies
• Ruta de Gloria Fuertes: Madrid
• Ruta de Miss Fillis
• Ruta de Orgullo: History of Lesbians at Pride