"With headphones, music, and everything else, it touched me deeply," says a student from IES Terra Roja in Santa Coloma de Gramenet after the performance ofEl sonall, which can be seen until April 26 at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. This immersive show, with live music (some paragraphs from a doctoral thesis are even read to the rhythm of rap), recounts the investigation of a real case: that of Catalina Muñoz. Mother of four, she was 37 years old when the Francoists executed her at the beginning of the Civil War. Some neighbors had accused her of making proclamations in favor of the Republic, and her husband had fled after confronting Falangists. When she was murdered, she was carrying the rattle of her youngest son, Martín, who was nine months old at the time. When archaeologists exhumed her grave, in La Carcavilla Park (Palencia), they found the small toy along with some buttons and the soles of her rubber shoes.

Officially, the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939, with the victory of the rebel faction led by Franco, who signed the last war report in Burgos. The Francoists had won on the front, but the fall of the Second Republic was also prepared from the rear. The Information and Military Police Service (SIPM) played a central role in controlling propaganda, diplomacy, and the decomposition of the enemy from within.

The 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.

When George Orwell (1903-1950) decides to travel to Catalonia in 1936 to fight as a militiaman in the Civil War and "kill fascists", he does not go alone. He had only been married for a few months to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a brilliant 30-year-old woman who surpassed him in many educational aspects. While Eric Blair, the real name of the young English writer, had no more than secondary education at Eton, she had accumulated the background of having studied literature at Oxford and a postgraduate degree in psychology in London. They will have an unusual "honeymoon": while Orwell is on the Aragon front, Eileen will work in Barcelona receiving British militiamen and will be the first to realize the seriousness of the internal conflict that will lead to the May Events.

It is well known that the experiment of the Second Republic sparked interest beyond our borders. But the Civil War, the work of the military who rose up against democracy in July 1936, dashed any revolutionary ambitions. Although those who threw themselves into defending the country from fascism, whether with weapons or with instruments like the pen or the camera, did not know it then.

While thousands of people fled as best they could toward the French border, on February 4, 1939, at the Can Pol farmhouse in Montfullà, Bescanó, where the Generalitat (Catalan government) had stored works of art from Tarragona to protect them from the war, a woman and her children awaited the arrival of Franco's troops. The woman in question was Rosa Sendrós Carbonella, the wife of Pere Rius, the curator of the Reus Museum, and she had the delicate task of handing over the keys to the storage facility to the rebel soldiers. This anecdote perfectly illustrates the story the exhibition aims to tell. Recovered from the enemy. Francoist caches at the MNACwhich can be seen at the National Art Museum of Catalonia until June 28. In the first room, there is another document that demonstrates this commitment by Catalan institutions to safeguarding heritage: a sketch made by the archivist Agustí Duran i Sanpere showing all the collections distributed throughout Catalonia, to facilitate the work of the victors.

Spain is a nation-state embroiled in civil war. The problem is the Civil War. Clinging to the conflict like junkies. Pay attention to the latest narcotic. Congress has exploded. 1936: The War We All Lost. It wanted to be a sisterly hodgepodge of the war we all wagedThe writer David Uclés has said that he wouldn't sit next to Aznar and Espinosa de los Monteros. The two Spains, locked in a struggle with the sword and the bomb. Here's a microhistory of the War.

"When the 90th anniversary of the start of the Civil War is commemorated this summer, I am sure that not much will be said about the revolution that took place in Catalonia between July 1936 and May 1937," explains historian and former deputy Aurora Madaula (Mollet del Vallès, 1978). Kaminski, one of the intellectuals who were in Barcelona at the time and ended up dedicating an entire book to it, The ones from Barcelona (1937). Adesiara recovers it in Catalan, with an extensive prologue by Madaula and with the revised translation that Francesc Parcerisas He did it for Ediciones del Cotal in 1977.

"A son is like the sea. He shines before the houses, and a voice in his eyes the morning, the midday, the murky sunset, and the night, warm, violet, and crystallized like a glass of wine." Thus begins the moving and delicate monologue of the mother of Andreu Crous, protagonist ofHaceldamaHe recites to the chronicler who records his humble and unfortunate life after his death as a result of the train bombing perpetrated by his son. It is one of the most impressive and also one of the most controversial episodes in the second novel by Blai Bonet (Santanyí,1926 - Cala Figuera, 1997), published in Aymá Published in 1959 and now reissued, two decades after Ensiola's version (2005), by Club Editor, restoring the original text without the censorship, especially editorial, of the proofreaders of the time.

Figueres was dubbed the Catalan Guernica because of the high number of deaths caused by fascist bombings during the Spanish Civil War. In the midst of one of the deadliest bombing raids, in Plaça del Gra, a nurse found little Elena crying desperately among the mutilated bodies and rubble. The girl threw herself into the nurse's arms as bombs continued to rain down on the civilian population. Elena was located years later in the French town of Fumel, where the nurse had taken her in, believing she had been orphaned. The little girl was able to return to her parents, but she could never forget the noise of the planes and bombs over the city, nor, of course, the nurse who had saved her and cared for her like a daughter. Like a nightmare, the drone of the aircraft was also forever etched in the memories of the protagonists of the six stories told in the play. Noise of airplanesWritten by Manel Puig, directed by Àngels Barrientos and Maria Rosa Oliveres, and performed by actors from two amateur theater companies, the play, consisting of six monologues—one for each of the six stories told—has been a great success in Castelló d'Empúries and Llançà, where every performance has sold out. It begins a tour of several towns in the Empordà region this January. According to Manel Puig, the play's success stems from the fact that "instead of focusing on the war at the front, soldiers against soldiers, it deals with the suffering of civilians on the home front," based on the experiences of six real people. Puig also maintains that presenting these experiences of the Spanish Civil War through theater allows "historical memory to reach the public more easily, especially young people."

Hunger in post-war Spain, despite the dictatorship's attempts to mask it, is quite present in literature. We perceive it in novels such as Nothing (1945), by Carmen Laforet; The beehive (1951), by Camilo José Cela; Time of silence (1961), by Luis Martín Santos, and The Diamond Square (1962), by Mercè Rodoreda. the historian Michelangelo del Arco Blanco (Granada, 1979) goes a step further: it documents and demonstrates it in The Spanish famine (Crítica, 2025). He speaks of the victims of hunger but also of those responsible. "All the great famines of the 20th century are related to political decisions. In Spain, it was a weapon of war against the vanquished," he states.

The victims of the dictatorship have repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, sought justice in Spain. Sant Julià de Ramis attempted to address the issue of the plunder in 2019. The Gironès town council claimed 9,786 Republican pesetas from that era, equivalent to €136,123.26. After the Council of Ministers rejected the request, Sant Julià de Ramis filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, also unsuccessful. With the Democratic Memory Law, passed in 2022, the Caldes de Montbui Town Council hopes to succeed with a new claim. It will not be easy, because while the Spanish government committed to documenting the plunder, the legislation does not specify how the victims can be compensated.

Half a century after the death of Franco, the New Zealand Pasionaria Dolores Ibárruri Hoy has finally obtained her Spanish passport. She is not related by blood to the leader of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), but in a way she is an heir through history and family memory. She is not from the Gallarta mining region in Vizcaya—not even close. In fact, she was born in 1963 practically on the other side of the world: in Lower Hutt, about 14 kilometres from Wellington, the capital of the southern country, where she currently lives.

In the subsoil of Barcelona, ​​more than 1,322 Civil War shelters have been officially recorded, but many more remain undocumented, and new ones are discovered every year. The latest was unearthed during the construction work at La Sagrera station and was not included in the 1938 shelter census. The structure, linked to the former freight station, is notable for its bunker-like design, and its state of preservation is quite remarkable. Begun in 1917, the freight station became fully operational in 1923 and for many years also served as a customs post for goods arriving from abroad. It was dismantled in the 1990s and is slated for demolition. According to the Archaeology Service, this is a private shelter that served the former freight station and has remained hidden for decades. The CNT collectivized the railway sector during the Civil War, and it was the workers who promoted and built the shelter. "The structure had been completely hidden and only emerged due to the earthworks involved in the current railway project and the future redevelopment of this area," explains the Barcelona City Council in a press release. The route of this shelter connected the two buildings that stood on either side of the entrance to the old freight terminal. One of them was demolished last decade, while the second still stands and houses Adif's offices.

No matter where you are in Spain, you'll find a mass grave within 50 kilometers. That's one of the conclusions you can draw. on the interactive audiovisual map The country of 6,000 mass graves which RTVE has produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory. The map, based on documentation from exhumations carried out over the last 25 years, allows users to geolocate and obtain information about the burial sites of more than 17,000 victims. The website, launched just days before the 50th anniversary of Franco's death, features stories of the victims and also includes various materials, such as photographs provided by families or memory organizations, and RTVE videos.

"This is a miracle. We have discovered a great, previously unknown artist. The only Catalan and Spanish artist who worked extensively for British and Allied propaganda during the Second World War," says journalist Plácido Garcia-Planas, who curated the exhibition with historian Arnau González. Ink against Hitler, which can be seen at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) until January 11. The unknown artist is Mario Armengol Torrella (San Juan de las Abadesas, 1909–Nottingham, 1995), who worked for the British government from 1941 until the collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. He was much more useful to the Allies as a cartoonist. His drawings lay in boxes in the home of his son and two grandchildren for over thirty years. Now, for the first time, they can be seen by the Catalan public.

Juan Bautista Peset (Godella, 1886 - Paterna, 1941) might have been spared a firing squad. A doctor and rector of the University of Valencia, Franco sentenced him to 30 years and one day, but some of his faculty colleagues weren't satisfied. They filed a second complaint and, to convince the Francoists, sent a lecture in which the only parish priest shot after the Civil War defended republicanism. Peset was buried in the tomb of his younger brother, who had died when he was just 2 years old. Until the arrival of democracy, no one dared to put his name in the cemetery.

On February 8, 1939, the village of Llers (Alt Empordà) disappeared from the map. The Republican army, with the war almost lost, detonated the powder magazine in the church, leaving only rubble. The neighbors had been warned, but they hadn't expected such destruction. When they returned, they no longer found their house, nor the sheets or the dishes they had hidden. "Nothing remained. The residents of Llers lost absolutely everything, not even their memories. They had lived through three years of war, and on the last day, their town blew up," he explains. Maria Escalas (Palma, 1969), which in the book Nothing was left (Ara Llibres) captures how that loss impacted its inhabitants.

"The meager and absurdly idiotic meals, the hunger, a genuine and excruciating hunger that attacks the nerves; the lice, those little bugs that, if we could, we would eliminate in five minutes and against which we must sustain an exhausting and sterile fight. And the cold, that new enemy that has not been new, sharpens your nerves," wrote Pere Vives (Barcelona, ​​​​1910 - Mauthausen, 1941) to the poet Agustí Bartra on December 14, 1939. A little over a month later, on January 27, 1940, he sent him the last one. He would send his family one last one, from a prisoner-of-war camp, on June 22, 1941. After that, there was a long silence, because it was not until after the Second World War that Vives's mother learned that her son had died in October 1941 in Mauthausen, where he had been deported two months earlier. He never sent any letters from the concentration camp, and the only witness to how he died is the one left by his companion. Joaquín Amat-Piniella to KL Reich: had been given a shot of gasoline.

The Montcada i Reixac cemetery will be integrated as a memorial site within the Network of Democratic Memorial Sites of Catalonia. Victims of the Republican rearguard violence were buried in this cemetery in the Vallès Occidental. Until the Generalitat (Catalan regional government) regained control of public order after the May 1937 events, the revolutionary committees killed priests, people considered right-wing, property owners, and foremen without trial. Sometimes it was for ideological reasons and sometimes personal ones, as revenge also occurred. The murders often took place in the Arrabassada region, and the victims were buried in the Montcada cemetery. Between July 19, 1936, and May 1937, some 1,200 victims were buried.