Antonio Machado's poem “The Crime Was in Granada” is about a real historical event, the murder of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca on July 18, 1936. Lorca was killed at the onset of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1937); it was a murder almost certainly politically motivated in part. The poem was first published in memory of Lorca in the newspaper Ayuda on October 17, 1936.

Lorca is said to have been killed by supporters of General Francisco Franco, who were intent on eliminating influential artists and other figures who did not support the general in his attempt to take over Spain. Others suggest that a personal vendetta was involved and that Lorca's support of those opposing Franco was only part of what instigated his murder. Either way, this killing was a shameful assassination of a great literary figure whose involvement in politics was minimal, despite his political convictions; this shame is a major theme in Machado's poem. That is, by emphasizing so strongly that Lorca was killed in his own hometown (he was born in 1898 just outside Granada, in Fuente Vaqueros, and his family moved to Granada in 1909), Machado suggests the degree to which Lorca's death was a terrible betrayal of fundamental decencies.

As a mature and powerful poem, “The Crime Was in Granada” is a respected work of Machado's. Most broader collections of Machado's poems, such as the Selected Poems, translated by Alan S. Trueblood, include the poem, and most larger libraries own a copy of Trueblood's translations.