"It's very emotional. In some ways this closes a circle," Laura Garcia Lorca told AFP late Tuesday as she paid homage to her famous uncle, a trailblazing poet who lived in New York between 1929 and 1930, before returning to Spain, where he was killed in the first days of the civil war in August 1936.

Laura Garcia Lorca joined Mexican Lorca expert and journalist Norberto Bogard on the walking tour, which at one point stopped outside the church on Riverside Driver where she herself grew up and where the poet visited.

"I was born here, I lived here until I was 11 and then I came back," she said. "This is my city like no other."

Laura Garcia Lorca heads the Garcia Lorca Center, which manages the poet's archives in the Spanish city of Granada.

The key stop on the tour was at the front entrance to Columbia University where Lorca once came to study English. The stay in the booming American city gave rise to his collection "Poeta en Nueva York," a work filled with existential angst and featuring a radical change of style.