Isabel Olesti's latest book (Reus, 1957), Les dones i les ombres (Proa), is not a historical novel, nor a memoir, nor a war novel. And, despite this, the story takes place between the 1930s and 1940s in Catalonia, starts from family memories, and is profoundly marked by the Civil War. Olesti's mother lived through the conflict sheltered in a farmhouse in Baix Camp, along with her parents and sisters, and surrounded by a group of people who, at first, did not know each other at all. Many years after those experiences, the writer – author of books such as El marit invisible (Columna, 1999) and La pell de l'aigua (Proa, 2012) – has transformed them into a fictional story starring two families who coexist in a forced daily life, between uncertainty, fear, and desire.

The summer of 1936, Federico García Lorca (Granada, June 5, 1898 - between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada, August 18 or 19, 1936) decided to leave Madrid and go to Granada for a short stay. The assassination of the Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Calvo Sotelo, on July 13, had left him very uneasy. "July 18 was his saint's day and his father's, and they were going to celebrate it, and also to say goodbye to the family because he was leaving for Mexico with the actress Margarida Xirgu. His intention was to return to Madrid in the autumn, because he was to premiere La casa de Bernarda Alba and publish Poeta en Nueva York", explains journalist and writer Víctor Fernández.

"Lorca is a universal symbol and is alive in the memory of all of us, his work can be found in any library, but of the rest of thousands of murders in Granada there is hardly any information and they must be rescued from oblivion. There is a memory that could not leave the houses for fear of the Civil Guard, the police and the neighbors themselves," points out the archaeologist Francisco Carrión, who has led many of the excavations, including that of the Barranc de Víznar, in Granada.

In the summer of 1963, Valencia made a tour of Mexican lands. It was not an easy tour, as the Mexican state did not recognize Franco's Spain. Valencia's coach at the time was the Basque Jacinto Quincoces, a legend of Spanish football who had played for Madrid. During that tour, Quincoces met up with Luis Regueiro. Basque like him. A former Madrid player like him. But the first had sympathized with the Francoists and the second, with the Republicans, which is why he ended up exiled in Mexico. During that tour, they dined together with other former footballers who had been separated by the Civil War. They took photographs together, and those who lived in Mexico gave Quincoces an album in which a handwritten text could be read: "Noble friendship. Against cold and hot wars, atomic bombs, political agreements and all the disgust and deceit that currently roam the world in which we live... It is so strong and indestructible that neither years nor distance can crack it".The album has ended up in the hands of the Catalan historian Arnau González i Vilalta, who has published El primer clásico antes del abismo (Editorial Base). A work in which he investigates what happened to the Real Madrid and Barça players who played the final of the Copa de la República on June 21, 1936, a match played a few days before the start of the Civil War. Players like Quincoces and Regueiro. Madrid won 2-1, with Ricardo Zamora making a key save on the Barça player Escolà in the final minutes of the match. "In the photos you can see how Zamora stops the ball just over the goal line. It's an iconic image, as the photograph captures the white dust rising from the goal line. A striking image, when you think of everything that came after," says the historian. The war also took its toll on those athletes. González has spoken with the descendants of the players who played that match, and has traveled abroad several times, especially to Mexico. He has rummaged through archives and has taken the book further, to place it in its historical context. "It's a long story that will extend to a dinner in Mexico City in 1963, summarized in an album of photographs that some of the protagonists of the match gave to the Real Madrid defender Jacinto Quincoces," he explains.

The writer Pere Pena (Seròs, 1962) was investigating a few years ago the death of his great-uncle during the Civil War when he came across the disappearance of a teacher from Seròs, Candelària Ametlla. From that mystery, Pena began to craft the story of his first novel, Sota la pell, un arbre (Eclecta), which reconstructs Candelària's life by mixing reality and fiction. The author begins with his sentimental awakening to link the teacher's figure with Rita, a French girl who spent her summers in the village. He does this through interviews with war witnesses and relatives of exiles, in a polyhedral narrative that is also made up of his thoughts to end up drawing a literary mosaic of the collective memory of a village.

The beginning of the Civil War in Catalonia cannot be understood without Shakespeare. The British man had been there for a long time. In the 19th century, the way to make him superpop, mainstream, cool was to transform his works into lobotomized parodies, adaptations with "costellada" Catalan, cuttings from the original tree, or textual grafts from lysergic minds. This way, a very wide audience got it in a fun way (calm down, Christopher Nolan's friends-enemies, the Odyssey, everything is done, you know). But comedy is tragedy plus time. And the shadow of Shakespeare-Hamlet turned Catalonia into a stage with a full program of calamitous doubts in 1936-1939.

Upon the end of the Civil War, the Special Documentation Delegation of the Francoist apparatus confiscated tons of administrative documentation from the Generalitat and various entities with a clear repressive purpose. Among this documentation were the papers of the Generalitat's Subsidy Office, with the name, political affiliation, place of birth, and the fronts and columns where 37,002 militiamen and women had fought. Whether men or women, and regardless of their rank, they earned 10 pesetas daily. This documentation, after a long and intense mobilization of Catalan civil society, returned to Catalonia in 2006. It was the first intake, of 500 bundles, that arrived at the National Archive of Catalonia (ANC). This collection has made it possible for the Memorial Democràtic, with the collaboration of the archive, to create a public database of militiamen."With this tool, relatives and researchers will be able to find the life trajectories of their relatives," assures historian Gonzalo Berger, doctor in contemporary history from the University of Barcelona and specialist in militias. Berger has led the research that culminates eleven years of research initiated with his doctoral thesis. The human value of this tool is evident in testimonies like that of Marta Domper, who for years searched for proof of the history of her great-uncle, Joaquim Domper. "Sometimes I had even asked myself if he had really existed – she explains–. At home, my great-uncle had always been spoken of as a hero. He was from the CNT and went as a volunteer to fight against the rebels." Afterwards, he went to France to fight with the Resistance and never returned to Spain.

The dampness that seeped through the walls and the darkness that filled the narrow corridors and rooms of the air-raid shelter in the Jardins de la Infància in Girona were forever etched into the memory of the citizens who hid there when planes flew over and bombed the city during the Civil War. On days of inclement heat waves, visiting this basement, reconverted into a Democratic Memory Space of the Girona History Museum, allows one to learn how the people of Girona protected themselves against aerial attacks and, at the same time, enjoy the much-desired climatic comfort on days of suffocating temperatures.

This summer marks 90 years since the failed landing in Mallorca by a group of Republican troops, mostly Catalan, led by Captain Alberto Bayo. In the wake of the anniversary, new editions of two recommendable classics have appeared: El desembarcament de Bayo a Mallorca (Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat) by the late Father Josep Massot i Muntaner and Els grans cementiris sota la lluna by Georges Bernanos (Nova Editorial Moll, translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer). These necessary rediscoveries coincide with the appearance of an exceptional book: Una isla brutalizada (Documenta Balear).The uniqueness is at least triple. Firstly, to tackle the first research book dedicated to his native Mallorca, Joan Maria Thomàs (Palma, 1953) has immersed himself in the family archive, from which he has recovered documentation, photographs and, above all, an epistolary treasure. Thus, the 491 letters shared by his future parents during the first months of the war allow him to reconstruct its impact, both on the front and in the island's rearguard, the profound sociopolitical transformations, the terrible repressive consequences and the complexity hidden behind the Manichaeism of any civil conflict. Furthermore, the personal notes of the Catholic municipal judge and military volunteer Gerardo Maria (Palma, 1905-1985) and of the young woman from a good family and volunteer in passive defense Àngela (Palma, 1910-2016) enrich the narrative with custom, linguistic (the letters will always be in Mallorcan Catalan, except for some brief parenthesis) and localist notes.A cruel persecution

Furthermore, the emeritus professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili substantiates, in line with what previous bibliography has already pointed out, the decisive nature of the failed landing in strictly framing those in favor of the rebels and in cruelly persecuting the rest: whether they were the captured, harassed, and shot militiamen, whether we spoke of the thousands of islanders who suffered the different repressive gears, whether it was the author's uncle priest –the musicologist Joan Maria Thomàs Sabater– accused of Catalanism. “Because what was happening was not only the expansion of a great animosity against an enemy that continuously bombed the civilian population, but a massive preventive repressive policy, which detained and imprisoned thousands of Mallorcans who seemed to the military and public order authorities to be susceptible of forming part of the 'internal enemy', assassinating a part of them, although the first great wave of deaths would not arrive until the landing occurred”. According to the latest census, we would be talking about 1,993 victims with names and surnames, but only the remains of 329 have been located in 28 different places, and only 68 have been identified.And third and last, Thomàs constructs, with the mettle of good historians, a critical account that does not seek to exonerate but rather to understand and make understood the complexity inherent in those events. He does so, for example, by collecting the legal and Christian scruples of Gerardo Maria himself, who, despite voluntarily joining the rebels and sharing an eschatological interpretation of the conflict, distances himself from violent excesses and, faced with veiled threats for his lack of repressive enthusiasm, will leave for the Peninsula. This unease will never place him in public dissent with the dictatorship, but it surely explains that in 1953, as a judge, he carried out the exhumation of a victim murdered in Mallorca during the war by a prominent local falangist. And a civil war on an island is practically a war within the family.

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Ten years ago, a jolt impacted the family of playwright, director, and actor Jaume Viñas (Barcelona, 1987). Following that shake-up, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins began to hold a series of family lunches and dinners where, all of a sudden, everyone opened up about things that had previously been kept in the shadows. "My sister and I realized that our two grandmothers had suffered a lot," explains Viñas. That experience sowed the seed for L'albada, the playwright's most ambitious production, which will be performed from June 25 to July 30 at the Biblioteca de Catalunya under the direction of Oriol Broggi and as part of the Grec festival. With around forty characters, the production spans three generations and is a grand family story that delves into the silences, memory, and legacy derived from the Civil War. Viñas prefers not to explain the nature of the family jolt so as not to reveal the play's ending.

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January 2024, ARA revealed for the first time some staggering figures. During the Civil War (1936-1939), the cemetery of Sant Boi de Llobregat – a municipality that at the time barely exceeded 10,000 inhabitants – registered the death of more than 3,000 people admitted to the municipality's psychiatric hospital. This Saturday, finally, the memory of those men and women has been rescued from anonymity with an institutional tribute. A plaque from the Directorate General for Democratic Memory makes them visible and recalls their history. Their descendants not only have a place to bring flowers, but they also know something more about those who died a few meters from the cemetery. Just a week ago, after many demands, they received the medical records of some of their relatives.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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