Il y Avait un Jardin

Rafa Manzano

2025 — Almeria, Spain

About this series

There is an old, unfinished poem that tells a sad story about a city. Its verses recount how Almería  fell into the hands of Alfonso VII, stripped of its splendor, of the majesty of its sultanate—silencing its voices, its music… leaving its gardens and ditches barren, crushing its traditions, driving its poets into exile, distorting every trace of its former history… consigning it to a dream from which it would never awaken.
But the poem remains unfinished. And there is no one left from that time who can tell us how it truly ended, what it was like, or how life continued after the events it describes.
Time stopped long ago. Successive layers of life have fossilized memory. But what if we tried to dig, what would we discover? Is anything left of those times—of those people, their homes, the gardens once envisioned, the ditches, the landscapes ? And so I began to daydream, inventing an ending to the poem.

Photographer: Rafa Manzano
Nationality:  Spanish
Based in: Almeria, Spain
Instagram: @rafamanzanogarcia

Rafa Manzano has participated in numerous exhibitions, festivals, and publications in newspapers and photography magazines. He served as Director of the Jury for the Science and Photography competition at the University of Granada in 2010. In 2012, he took part in the Crowdfunding roundtable at the Andalusian Photofestival in Granada. In 2013, he worked as Cultural Manager and Director of Photography at the School of Music and Arts in Almería. That same year, his project Por el Cabo was selected for Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Portugal. In 2014, he was awarded the Encontros de Artistas Novos IV grant in Santiago de Compostela. He was selected as Photographer/Author by the Andalusian Center of Photography for the group exhibition Un Certain Panorama—focused on new Spanish photography and emerging photographic talent—held in Almería from 2 November 2017 to 7 January 2018. He has been a speaker and lecturer at the Museum of Archaeology of Almería on documentary and author photography projects. He has also served as a guest professor at the School of Arts of Almería, delivering masterclasses on photographic projects and medium-format photography.