Cante Jondo, Granada 1922

On 13 and 14 June 1922, a music festival-style competition, with its categories and financial prizes, turned the world of flamenco upside down and corrected its predictable path to ostracism.

Our most “jondo” poet, Federico García Lorca, made a great fuss when in 1922 he organised the “Cante Jondo” Contest in Granada together with Manuel de Falla and Ignacio de Zuloaga. It only took two days to change the fate of flamenco.

Because that was, after all, the aim of Falla and Lorca, and also of many other intellectuals and artists who were living with horror the drift of Andalusian art with the proliferation of the cafés cantantes. Bringing flamenco out of obscurity and giving it the light it deserved was the result of that contest.