Casa-Museo de Miguel Hernández

The Casa-Museo de Miguel Hernández preserves the family home where the poet spent much of his childhood and youth, from 1914 to 1934. Hernández, born in Orihuela in October 1910, belonged to the so-called Generación del 36, and is one of the most widely read Spanish poets of the 20th century.

The house and the orchard

The visit takes in Miguel's bedroom, the kitchen, the courtyard with the old shed for the goats the family raised and sold, and the orchard where the fig tree he mentions in several of his poems still stands. The town council acquired the building in 1981 and, after a restoration supported by Banco Exterior de España, the museum opened for good on 28 March 1985. Today the visit runs through three connected spaces: a visitor reception area, the house-museum itself, and an exhibition hall with manuscripts, photographs and personal belongings.

Hernández, from a modest background and largely self-taught, became one of the major voices in Spanish poetry before dying young: after the Civil War he was arrested in 1939 and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to thirty years in prison. He died of tuberculosis in a prison in Alicante in 1942, at the age of 31.

The house-museum stands in the old town of Orihuela, close to the cathedral, the Church of Santas Justa y Rufina and the Convento de Santo Domingo, making it easy to combine with the rest of the city's historic sites.