Great Spanish poet and humanist, Antonio Machado was born in Seville on 26 July 1875. A committed Republican, he fled Franco's dictatorship. On 22 January 1939, surrounded by his family and a few friends, he left Barcelona and chose Collioure as his place of exile. Taken in at the Casa Quintana, exhausted and ill, the poet died on 22 February 1939. Buried in Collioure's old cemetery, his grave has become a place of pilgrimage.
