Paradores de Turismo withdraws Carnival campaign that trivializes Francoist repression

BarcelonaThe Spanish network of Paradores de Turismo has removed from its website a campaign for a Carnival proposal that invited people to go dressed as prisoners and promised "luxury cells" at the Hostal de San Marcos in León, a place that was a concentration camp after the Civil War. "If your costume has you confined, the León paradero will be your luxury prison. Located in an old monastery, this paradero offers you a comfortable cell with impressive architecture and a history that will make you feel like a real prisoner," said the advertisement on the Paradors de Turisme website, which has already been.

As reported by the Efe agency, the withdrawal of the campaign came after the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) denounced that the Parador de San Marcos in León trivialized the pain of the victims of Francoism by proposing to celebrate Carnival in costume. "It is a clear trivialisation of the pain of the victims who were detained and tortured in the facilities [of the former monastery] and a call in bad taste that attacks the memory of the victims, a memory that must be respected and remembered as a traumatic past that must not be repeated," says the ARM.

The association assures that if something similar happened in an illegal Nazi detention centre in Germany or Austria, "the person responsible would end up sitting in front of a judge." It also recalls that it has demanded that the Spanish government declare the Parador de San Marcos a place of memory so that "the suffering of all the Republicans tortured and murdered by the fascists in 1936 is not forgotten," and that the suffering of the prisoners is marked with "rigour and visibility."