Luis Cernuda Bidón was born in central Seville on Tójar St. (today Acetres) on September 21, 1902, the third child of Amparo Bidón Cuéllar and Bernardo Cernuda Bauzá, a military officer. His mother had given birth to daughters Ana (1894) and Amparo (1895). The age difference between the poet and his sisters, though negligible as adults, was certainly significant when the three were still children and helped create the sense of isolation and loneliness that the future poet always identified with his childhood and youth.

Despite the age difference, his sisters and cousins were Luis’ playmates in a family environment marked by poor emotional interaction, and the strict discipline imposed by their severe father. That environment left a deep imprint on his childhood visible in his poem “La familia”: "La casa familiar, el nido de los hombres, / Inconsistente y rígido, tal vidrio / Que todos quiebran, pero nadie dobla"  1  .

Luis lived his first thirteen years in the house where he was born. In 1915, after his father’s promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the family moved to the barracks of the Third Regiment of Sappers, an imponent military building still standing across from the Parque María Luisa, on Borbolla Avenue. Luis was already in his high school studies.

He attended school with Piarists monks (Escolapios) in Seville, first in San Ramón School, which he entered in September 1913, and two years later in the Calasancio Hispalense.  As he recalled in Historial de un libro, his teacher, father Antonio López, not only taught him the basic forms of poetic expression, but also encouraged him to write. During those years, Cernuda read Bécquer’s poetry that remained one of his lyric favorites.