There is a woman that some say died in 1983. A woman that some say remains between other great personalities of Latin-American music like Libertad Lamarque, Agustin Lara, Carlos Gardel, Pedro Vargas, Lola Beltran, Rafael Hernandez, but if none of them is really dead, Chabuca Granda never will.

To listen to Chabuca Granda cannot be described. Her voice could not be catalogued as beautiful, there are moments that it seems a strange sentimental violin and at the same time a heart-rending complaint. None of that matters. "La flor de la Canela", her most famous song, has been performed by hundreds of splendid voice singers, but none of them could ever sing with the sentiment, the strength, the sweetness and the happiness of Chabuca.

Her songs, however, are precious poems. She speaks of a beginning of 1900 Lima, the one her father lived, a Lima filled with glowing little streets, balconies and endlessly bohemian nights, with ficus, jasmines and jacarandas, a manorial Lima of grating old houses and hallways, of Barranco and its traditional Puente de los Suspiros (Sighs' Bridge). But she always talked about Peru with an unsurpassable love, about centenarian traditions as the Paso Horse and the cocks fight, about the greatness of the American continent, about personalities as Saint Martin de Pores, Manuel Solari, Mauro Mina, Violeta Parra and Javier Heraud, the latter a Peruvian poet she never met but dedicated ten of her songs.

Expert in the languaje, she bedizens her songs with a so rich vocabulary that it gives a color, a texture, a shine even more bright to what she says. Phrases as "light, which gives glint to light itself" or "between sleeping paths, blossoms Maria Dreams, drinking from the slopes to reach life", are samples of her impeccable creative capacity.

Cesar Calvo, Peruvian poet and one of her dearest friends used to say that a man that met Chabuca and did not fall profoundly in love with her, is not a man. Beautiful and wise woman, she was always against the social classes. Happy as nobody to have finally ascended to the populace, where she could find an alley black person behaving as a prince, and people that possess nothing but a huge heart.

Chabuca Granda have not died, she is still composing those beautiful songs, still being part of those endless revelries, still evoking her city the way she only can, still being born in Apurimac, in the middle of a miners camp high on the Andes, or how she used to say: "I have seen the light really close to the sun of the Incas, at nine and a half of a sunny morning, between veins o gold, love and sacrifice. I was born there, I am, well, proud and arrogant sister of the condors, I was born so high that I used to wash my face with stars."