It was the scene of an infamous murder almost a century ago that inspired a Spanish literary masterpiece, but ever since the former monastery of Cortijo del Fraile has lain crumbling and shrouded in silence.
A pile of stones marks the spot where Francisco Montes was shot three times in the head with his own revolver while trying to elope with his lover in 1928. The crime, which took place on the track to the isolated estate in Cabo de Gata in Almeria, Andalusia, inspired the play Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca.
Locals in the southeastern desert region were shamed by the notoriety brought by the play and maintained a wall of silence for decades, fearful that discussing the murder would open old wounds.
But now the taboo has lifted, local authorities have bought the decaying farmhouse for €2 million and announced renovations that would transform it into a museum.
“Due to Lorca’s play the place has passed into the Spanish collective imagination and become an historic icon,” Javier García, the head of Almeria’s provincial government, said. “The first step will be a consolidation of the building because it is very deteriorated. The priority is to save the chapel because it is the most emblematic part”.
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The chapel is where Francisca Canadas, who lived on the estate with her brothers, was due to marry Casimoro Pérez, a farm labourer, in an arranged marriage on July 22, 1928. On the morning of the wedding, Montes, her cousin, arrived at Frailes and whisked the bride-to-be away on his horse.
The couple were ambushed by a group of Pérez’s relatives, however. The jilted groom’s brother, José, is thought to have shot Montes with his own revolver while Canadas is said to have been attacked by her sister, Carmen, who tried to strangle her. She was left for dead but survived.
José Pérez spent three years in prison and Carmen Canadas was condemned for the attack on her sister but spent only a short time in jail. Francisca Canadas never married and lived as a recluse. She died in 1986. Casimoro Pérez did eventually marry and died in 1990.
Lorca wrote Blood Wedding after reading about the murder in a newspaper. Completed in 1932, it is seen as a tragedy symbolising the dark, violent nature of Spanish rural life, and which literary critics say foretold the barbarity of the 1936 to 1939 Spanish Civil War. At the start of the conflict Nationalist forces murdered Lorca and dumped his body in a mass grave by its side. In spite of several excavations his remains have never been found.
For years a melancholy air has hung over the Frailes estate. The former monastery, which was built in the 18th-century by Dominican friars, was seized by the state in the mass confiscations of ecclesiastical property in 1836 and passed into private hands. Its farmhouse and its chapel have been looted.
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Over the years the estate was used as a set for several films, due its desert “Wild West” surroundings, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the 1966 Spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood.
Occasionally elderly passers-by still stop to make the sign of the cross and add a pebble to the cairn that marks the spot of Montes’s murder. What actually happened there in 1928 has never been made clear. In an interview nearly two decades ago Joaquín Pérez, the son of the supposed murderer, said: “The only people who knew what happened have taken the secret with them to the grave. I know a few things but I am not going to tell them.”
