The University of Granada pays tribute to rector Salvador Vila on the 90th anniversary of his execution

The University of Granada will hold a tribute on Thursday, October 22 at 11:30 a.m. to Salvador Vila Hernández, rector of the institution executed in 1936, on the 90th anniversary of his death. The event will take place in the Salón de Caballeros XXIV of the Palacio de la Madraza and will be presided over by rector Pedro Mercado Pacheco.

The tribute will feature speeches by Francisco Carrión Méndez, director of the Cátedra de Memoria Democrática Salvador Vila; Mercedes del Amo Hernández, professor in the Department of Semitic Studies; and Roque Hidalgo Álvarez, professor in the Department of Applied Physics. The attendance of the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, and the prosecutor for Human Rights and Democratic Memory, Montserrat Luque, is expected.

Salvador Vila Hernández was born in Salamanca on August 2, 1904. He studied Philosophy and Letters and Law between 1920 and 1924 in his home city, where he was a student of Miguel de Unamuno. In 1924 he moved to Madrid with the San Bartolomé Scholarship and earned his doctorate in Semitic languages in 1928 at the Universidad Central de Madrid. In 1926, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and while still a student, he was deported to the Islas Chafarinas for his defense of democratic and republican principles. He furthered his studies at the University of Berlin, where he met Gerda Leimdörfer, who would become his wife. He began his teaching career in Baeza as professor of Spanish Literature and in October 1930 obtained the position of temporary assistant professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Madrid. In 1933 he was appointed professor of Arab Culture and Muslim Institutions at the University of Granada, a city where he joined intellectual circles and met, among others, Federico García Lorca, Manuel de Falla and Emilio García Gómez. In 1934 he combined the chair with the position of lecturer at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes de Granada, of which he was appointed director a year later. In April 1936 he was elected rector of the University of Granada. At the end of the academic year he went on holiday with his wife and son to Salamanca, where the Civil War caught up with them, resulting in his immediate dismissal. In October he was arrested in Salamanca and transferred to Granada, where on October 23 he was executed in Víznar along with 28 other people.

The tribute will be held on Thursday, October 22 at 11:30 a.m. in the Salón de Caballeros XXIV of the Palacio de la Madraza.