Joaquín Sabina

He completed his primary education with the Carmelite nuns and, at fourteen, began writing poems and composing music in a band formed with his friends called Merry Youngs, who mainly covered rock singers such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Little Richard. At that time, he had his first girlfriend, Virtudes Atero «Chispa», who served as inspiration for some love poems. This relationship was a bit turbulent since the father of Chispa, a notary from Úbeda, opposed it from the beginning and, a few years later, when Joaquín was a university student, he took his daughter to Granollers with the aim of definitively removing her from him. But Joaquín embarked on a journey with a friend to find her and set up a tent next to Chispa's family house.

The two young people escaped together, eventually ending up in the Arán Valley (Lérida), where they lived together for a few days, enjoying wine and lust. Later, he completed his high school education at the Salesians. At that time, he continued writing verses and read the works of fray Luis de León, Jorge Manrique and José Hierro, but also Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Herbert Marcuse. The day he passed the fourth year and the final exams, his father wanted to reward Joaquín with a wristwatch, to which he refused, expressing that he preferred a guitar; a request that was fulfilled. In contrast, his older brother did accept the watch, and according to Joaquín, this small detail would be the one that began to distance them: his brother would eventually become, like his father, a police officer, and he, a singer. In 1968, he moved to Granada to enroll in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and start his studies in Romance Philology at the university of the city, where he discovered the poetry of César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda.

Joaquín lived for the first time with a woman, named Lesley, who was preparing her thesis in Spanish in Granada.