Tica Fernández-Montesinos García (Granada, 1930), niece of Federico García Lorca, died this morning at the age of 92 in Aravaca (Madrid), where she lived with her family, sources close to the family have informed Efe.
Eldest daughter of Manuel Fernández-Montesinos Lustau, socialist mayor of Granada in 1935 and shot in 1936, and Concha García Lorca, Federico’s sister, Vicenta Fernández-Montesinos, whom everyone knew as Tica, lived a happy early childhood in La Huerta of San Vicente, in Granada, the summer home of the Lorca family, now converted into a museum.
But his life changed suddenly in August 1936, when he lost his father and uncle in three days.
In her second book of memoirs, “The sound of water in the acequias”, published in 2018, she compiled her memories as a child and teenager, taking as a starting point the family’s departure from Spain in 1940, when they set sail from Bilbao bound for New York when she was 10 years old.
The stay and evolution of the family in New York, the search to recompose and remake their lives in exile and the return in the 1950s to Franco’s Spain marked the life of this woman with a progressive spirit, a lucid mind and in permanent contact with the world of letters and arts.
In New York, Tica was educated in the most open-minded centers (Middlebury College in Vermont, Joan of Arc Junior High School and Dalton High School in New York, Bennington College in Vermont) until his definitive return to Spain in 1954.
Mother of two children, she had lived in Madrid since she was 24 years old.