Author: Antonina Rodrigo

When the Liberty got on the scaffold in Granada, the 26th of May 1831, was wearing a blue percal dress with cane-colour white lilies, grey stockings and black morocco leather shoes; she had deep blue eyes and fair skin; she was now wearing her fair hair, normally tied back with a peineta (decorative comb), down on her shoulders and chest; she was 26 years old and her name became a legend. She was accused of embroidering on a flag, the sentence Ley, Libertad, Igualdad (Law, Liberty and Equality) and of belonging to a liberal plot. When Pineda refused to betray her alleged accomplices, Pedrosa, a member of the Chancillería of Granada, who was secretly in love with her, ordered that Mariana be sent to prison. Among so many people’s protest, she was judged and senteced to die in the garrotte. The sentence took place in Campo del Triunfo in Granada, while the embroidered flag was being burnt. She is the most famous among liberal heroines, and almost a year later, Federico García Lorca wrote about the legend for the theatre and it became a universal character. When Federico was a child, playing in a circle, heard someone singing the beauty romance which was about the idea of keeping beauty when you die unfairly and young. He could not forget it. Mariana’s life was marked before her birth by pure chance, passion and misfortune. Her father was a sailor of noble birth and bad health, capable of outliving the English and the pirates, but in the autumn of his life, when he was going to Lucena to sell his lands to live off his income, he fell madly in love with a humble beauty called María Dolores Muñoz.