Route "Juan Latino: from slave to professor"

To speak of Juan Latino is to speak of an extraordinary life in a crucial time for the Modern Age, with connotations as special and surprising as the slave business was in sixteenth-century Granada. To speak of Juan Latino is to speak of the unknown history of slavery in Spain.

Black Africans were already very present in Nasrid Granada. They were slaves of the Hispano-Muslim nobility and royalty who, in 1492, as a result of the Capture of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs, were manumited. However, slavery continued to live in Granada, as part of the socio-economic fabric, until the abolition of slavery in Spain in 1880.

The toponymy of the streets and neighborhoods of the city remind us of the deep-rooted historical presence of Africans in everyday life: the Placeta de los Negros or the Barranco de los Negros, in the picturesque sacromonte neighborhood, are good examples of this.

The name and life of Juan Latino are totally unknown to most of the people of Granada, despite the enormous importance he had during the period of Spanish Renaissance Humanism. His extraordinary testimony of life and his literary work in Latin does not leave anyone indifferent. He was a friend of the Duke of Sessa and Don Juan of Austria. Great masters such as Miguel de Cervantes or Lope de Vega praised his work.

Ours is the story of an Andalusian slave, personal slave of the grandson of the Great Captain; Mr. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. He was raised in Córdoba, between Baena and Cabra, who settled in his youth in Granada and in it he married and lived until his death. He was buried in the church of Santa Ana, his parish with his family. Its 78 years of life (1518-1596), allow us to make, guided by the traces of his life that still remain in Granada, a historical tour of the most crucial century and the most emblematic places in the history of Granada and Spain.

He attained the chair of Latin at the University of Granada from Archbishop Pedro Guerrero in 1556 and remained in active teaching until 1586.

The quality of his rhetoric, the forcefulness of his dialectic, his advanced pedagogy and the coherence of his arguments led him to be one of the most admired poets and writers in Latin of Humanism.

Language available for the route: Spanish.