The 50 young soldiers who did not emerge alive from the cave of Santa Llúcia

The Bishop of MontsantThe cave of Santa Llúcia, one kilometre from La Bisbal de Montsant (Priorat), holds many stories. Neighboring the wild Prades mountains, it is a shallow but large cave that housed a makeshift hospital during the Battle of the Ebro. We now know for certain that nearly fifty wounded Republican soldiers who passed through, most of them very young, could not survive. All of them were buried in a mass grave in the town's cemetery, which the Directorate General of Democratic Memory has been exhuming in recent months. It is estimated that practically all of them must have died during the first week of the Battle of the Ebro, between the early morning of July 25, 1938, when the Ebro Army, commanded by Juan Modesto Guilloto, launched the Republican offensive, and July 31. "When the army crossed the river, other emergency hospitals were created on the other side of the Ebro and the most seriously wounded were treated elsewhere," assures historian Jordi Martí.

Next to the cemetery trench there are rows of iron crosses. They are very simple and only bear the initials of the first and last names of townspeople who were buried there over the years. Many are practically as old as the Battle of the Ebro, because the cemetery was opened at the same time as the front reached the town, as the other one had become too small.

Among the 50 exhumed are 14 international brigaders. The trench where they were buried, next to the south wall, is narrow and long, about 27 metres, and the soldiers were placed with great care on different levels. Some alone, others in pairs. "There is little that can identify them, because most were buried without uniform and without boots," explains archaeologist Izaskun Ambrosio. Traumatic lesions compatible with bullet impacts have been detected on several skeletons. Medical treatments have also been documented, such as immobilizations of fractures with plaster or splints, amputations, drainage tubes, suture thread remains, and surgical staples.

There is little trace of who these soldiers were who could not return home. Only buttons, remnants of footwear and fabric, a spoon, a mirror, a bracelet, and a ring with the UGT union seal have been found. The excavation work began on June 25, 2025, and has lasted until February of this year. The intervention has been complicated mainly because there are later burials and it has had to be excavated manually. Furthermore, the abundance of rain has slowed down the excavation.

In 1938, with the help of the villagers, and in most cases with a cart, volunteers and soldiers carried the soldiers who had not managed to survive from the cave to the cemetery. At one end of the trench there is a small mausoleum where two little girls rest, who were sisters, and who died along with another child during the bombing by Francoist aviation on August 4, 1938: Dolors and Pilar Domingo Masip, aged 7 years and 18 months, respectively, and Agapit Masip Esquerda, aged 5 years.

The neighbor who did not want the soldiers to be forgotten

On August 4, Bisbal de Montsant, where just over 200 inhabitants now live, was filled with smoke and noise due to Francoist artillery and bombs. Enric Masip, a resident who has fought for many years to ensure these soldiers are not forgotten, remembers it well. His father was the village baker, and when the Republican army arrived, they requisitioned the bakery to make bread for the soldiers. "My mother was upstairs, and when she heard the bombs, she hid under the bed, but then she remembered that my grandfather always told her to stand in the doorway. She always told me how she experienced it, like a cataclysm, with all the black smoke. The soldiers working in the bakery and my father ran out and pulled her from under the rubble, and that marked her deeply – he recalls. As a child, for me, my mother's story was the war, and later, in 1948, my uncle showed me the cave and told me it had been a hospital," he explains. Masip has strived for years for the cave to be restored and for everything that happened there to be told. "In 1982 it was cleaned, and in 1991 the owners sold it to the City Council. Currently, some panels explain the whole story," he says, as he walks through the corridors of the small cemetery. "In 2000, a group of brigadistas came to the cemetery. It was a very emotional event, some cried, and a great connection was made between past and present," he concludes.

That event is remembered by a plaque very close to the mass grave where, in recent years, inscriptions with the names of three soldiers buried there have also been placed: Ramon Viñeta Soler, born in Ripoll; Isidre Manyosa Companyó, from Ripollet, and Isidre Tella Valls, a resident of Barbens. The cemetery also has two niches with the remains of two Republican soldiers, a captain and a commissar who were buried without any inscription. Their deaths were not registered and, for the moment, they have not been identified. The two soldiers died accidentally on the road to Torre de l'Espanyol, when they were shot by a soldier from the same army who was guarding the road. The driver of the vehicle in which they were traveling fell asleep and, because he did not stop when asked to, they thought they were enemies.

There is a Civil Registry list with the names of the soldiers buried in the ditch and, through genetic and anthropological analyses carried out at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and by cross-referencing data with the DNA Bank, some may be recovered by their families. The most complicated will be finding the relatives of the brigadists. "In many cases we know where they were born and we have contacted the town councils to find some relatives," explains the director of Democratic Memory, F. Xavier Menéndez. Many of these brigadists, when they came to fight in the Civil War, were very young and had no children and, after more than 80 years, their memory has been fading.

"In the village we have always known that this mass grave existed, but the register with their names was missing for many years after the war. In 1991 the list appeared in the attic of a village house as a result of a project carried out by school students," says Masip. Besides the register, there is a notebook. In the cave of Santa Llúcia, Dr. Miquel Gras Artero worked, who noted the names of the soldiers he attended to, both those who survived and those who died. Gras was in different hospitals and his annotations were also very important for obtaining information about the soldiers buried in the Mas de Santa Magdalena mass grave, located at the end of the Serra de Cavalls and about 10 kilometers from Móra d'Ebre.

The last wish of a nurse

"We have most of the names and surnames, and most of them were very young –Martí points out–. The Republican army chose the Santa Llúcia cave because it was very large and spacious, it had a water spring inside, and it was protected and very well connected by road. Ambulances could reach the foot of the cave, where triage was carried out, and then the wounded were taken by stretcher to the cave. At first there were six surgical teams, but they were gradually reduced because they were moved to the other side of the river", adds Martí. The cave housed the surgery and blood transfusion services and a hundred beds, and mainly treated Republican soldiers, but also from the Francoist side. It was an American brigadier, who was an electrician, who made it possible to have electricity by installing a generator. His name was John Kozar, he survived the Civil War and returned to the United States on December 20, 1938. He married the nurse Jean Ewen and they had two children. He could not see them grow up because he died of hypothermia during World War II, when the ship he was traveling on was torpedoed in Arctic waters.

Despite working in precarious material conditions, the doctors and nurses of the Santa Llúcia cave made history in trauma surgery, blood transfusion, and the organization of surgical activity near the front. The experience marked both men and women. Patience Darton was a qualified nurse who was part of the British Medical Unit of the International Brigades and who was in Brunete, Teruel, and the Santa Llúcia cave. She worked at the Valls Rest Home, where she met the German Robert Aaquist in February 1938, but the relationship was short-lived, as he died in the Battle of the Ebro. In 1996, Darton returned to Spain as a guest at a tribute to the brigadiers and, on the same night, died at the hotel where she was staying. Her body was repatriated to England, but her family respected her last wish: she wanted to be covered with Aaquist's coat and cremated. Her last wish was for her ashes to be scattered in the Santa Llúcia cave.