God is Catalan. We have scientific and metaphysical proof. Even though we are far apart, there has always been a very good relationship. From km 0. The gas station philosopher Francesc Pujols creates God's first service station on earth: Catalan religion. "Because if having your own system is equivalent to having your own car, having your own religion is like having your own home." It is a natural, real religion, which is why faith here is everything that surrounds us. And Catalans are "compatriots of truth." The mission is to offer truth to the world: "Catalonia will link the two paths, material and spiritual, of humanity, in a cross, not of death, but of life, not of war, but of peace and moral progress." But war arrives. Catalan religion, Catalonia, found itself "between the flames of fire and the rivers of blood of the Civil War unleashed by the supporters of Spanish Spain against the supporters of Catalan Spain." Fire in the shack.

"I believe that today or tomorrow they will take us to Montjuïc. [...] I have nothing but to thank our Lord God who gives me reason and occasion to suffer [...] Do not lose hope. Cheer up!".These are the words written by Domènec Ribas Prat on November 11, 1938, two and a half months before Franco's troops occupied Barcelona. Ribas (1888-1955), manager of Magatzems Jorba —Can Jorba, on Portal d'Àngel in Barcelona—, addressed it to his wife, Neus Jorba, just after learning of the sentence condemning him to death. Although his file has not been preserved at the Model Prison, the text indicates that when he wrote the letter his transfer to Montjuïc Castle was imminent. Together with the text, Oriol Font, the businessman's grandson, has handed over to the association Memòria i Història de ManresaMemòria i Història de Manresa an unpublished drawing by an unknown author that portrays the businessman during his captivity in Montjuïc.

Barcelona's underground is dotted with air-raid shelters, and they all have a story behind them. 1,322 have been located, but there could be many more. The latest to be discovered could be shelter 230 of the Passive Defense Board and would connect to the area around the Abaceria Market.

"Ruins tell what people keep silent about," affirms archaeologist Alfredo González Ruibal (Madrid, 1976), who has spent two decades excavating the remnants of the Civil War and Francoism. He has explored mass graves, trenches, concentration camps, and shacks, and has eaten a pizza in the kitchen of the Pazo de Meirás, the summer residence of the Franco family until very recently. Pazo de Meirás, the summer residence of the Franco family until very recently. He has followed the trails of hunger and abundance. In País en ruinas (Crítica), he demonstrates that Spain is a great archaeological site of the repression of the war and the dictatorship, and that, indeed, many "treasures" that rebel against silence are hidden there.

My grandmother was only three years old when she lost her father. Her mother was left a widow and pregnant with her younger sister, María. This event completely changed the destiny of their lives.

On Wednesday, Quanta guerra! returned to TV3, arguably the best program currently available on public television. This time, Eloi Vila accompanied actor Roger Casamajor to retrace the steps of his grandfather Alejandro through the lands of Aragon, where he was sent with the Republican troops to halt the advance of the Francoists.

"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.