WHEN we survey our region’s past, all too often we find ourselves relating tales of tragedy and woe.
Today is different. We happily celebrate the birthdays of two sons and one daughter of Andalucia. Each, in his or her way, has graced the sunny South.
ISCO (born in Benalmadena: 21 April, 1992)
Francisco Roman Alarcon Suarez will be 34 on Tuesday.
Absolutely everyone in Spain knows him as ‘Isco’ – a professional footballer.
He used to play for Malaga, but his ability was so outstanding that one of the big clubs was sure to lure him away at some point.
It happened in 2013. Real Madrid swooped in and bought the attacking midfielder for 65 million euros.
What followed was a decade at the very pinnacle of the sport. He won 18 titles with his club (including four Champions’ League winner’s medals), and was capped for Spain 39 times.
In 2022, he returned to Andalucia.
He played for Sevilla for a season, before moving across the city to Betis, where he’s still on the staff today.
After two seasons as a regular, he has been in the starting-line only once this year.
Clearly coming to the end of his playing days, Isco is sure to move into management, and to garner glory for Andalucia for decades to come!
IAN GIBSON (born in Dublin: 21 April, 1939)
How can an Irishman merit a place in any list of illustrious Andaluces?
The answer is ‘automatically’, if that Irishman is Doctor Ian Gibson of Lecrin.
In the early 1960s, a shroud of silence covered the dark secrets of Spain’s Civil War period.
The deaths of several cultural leaders here in Andalucia remained uninvestigated, thirty years after the war.
A highly intelligent young writer with a gift for speaking and writing Spanish was making a name for himself in the British Isles.
Ian Gibson of Trinity Dublin, Queens Belfast and the University of London decided to move to Granada.
READ MORE: From Greek outsider to Spanish master: The remarkable rise of El Greco
He started with Lorca. All that was known was that the poet-playwright had been shot dead in the summer of 1936.
Gibson upset a lot of people when he started ferreting, but he didn’t stop until he had exposed the truth surrounding Lorca’s murder.
His writing talent is such that he made his discoveries read as fascinatingly as a detective novel.
Many more books have followed, educating us all on such important figures as Dali and Machado.
And nowadays, Dr Gibson (who became a Spanish citizen in 1984) is revered as an expert on the artistic life of Andalucia, and appears regularly on TV and in the newspapers (speaking flawless Spanish, of course)!
MARIA ZAMBRANO (born in Velez-Malaga: 22 April, 1904)
If you visit a Spanish university today, should you notice the gender of the students and lecturers at all, you’ll observe that there are more women than men.
A hundred years ago, thing were radically different.
The very first women pioneers were struggling to get in to Higher Education.
There are even instances on record of female students having to dress as men in order to be accepted!
By the time Maria Zambrano Alarcon died in 1991, she had long been recognized as a thinker of international standing.
Indeed, Malaga’s ultra-modern rail and retail hub is named in her honour.
In her teens and twenties, Maria studied philosophy in Segovia and Madrid.
Not only did she rub shoulders with Spain’s intellectual giants of the 1920s, but she became Europe’s foremost expert on the Dutch-Spanish thinker, Spinoza.
So important were Maria’s researches that the University of Madrid took her on as a professor at a time when there were hardly any female undergraduates!
She was seen as anti-Franco in her sentiments. Accordingly, she was forced into exile when Madrid fell to the dictator’s forces in 1939.
Maria wandered the world for 50 years, living and working in France, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Italy and Switzerland. Finally, in 1984, she returned to Spain.
Maria won many awards in her lifetime, and various university campuses are named in her honour.
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