"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.

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.

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.

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.

Just a few steps separate the Les Vinyes School Institute from the Castellbisbal cemetery. That's why, when they showed the cemetery in class as part of the Forgotten Memory project, where they delve into the Civil War and the repression, they were so impressed. map of gravesSome students jumped out of their chairs. "We saw that we had one right next to us. At first, I thought we were standing on top of it; it was shocking, and we went to the cemetery," says Estel, a student from Les Vinyes. "It's awful that we had it so close and didn't know anything," she adds. In the cemetery of this town in the Vallès Occidental region, there are two mass graves, one with the remains of three soldiers and another with twelve, and only the name of one of the Republican soldiers buried there is known. The men who were buried there died while trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the Francoist offensive of January 25, 1939. No signage commemorates them. The 3rd and 4th year ESO students at this school haven't just learned about the mass grave and its history. From the school, they have begun a real detective operation to find out more and have launched a campaign to have the grave exhumed. Part of the investigation led them to the family of one of the soldiers buried there, and this Friday, the son-in-law and two of the grandchildren of soldier Joan Torruella brought flowers to the cemetery in a very moving ceremony with the students. "We didn't just want to fulfill the school project and do enough. We wanted to do much more because it's so important," says Celia. "This should have been done as a country. I think it's terrible that it hasn't been done until now," explains Bruna. "Families have the right to know where they can bring flowers and where they can go to talk to their dead; they have right to exhume relatives "To give them a proper burial," Rayan says.

The foser is the one who opens graves, the gravedigger. Spain is considered the country in the world with the second most mass graves after Cambodia, which holds this macabre record as a result of the massacres perpetrated in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge under the orders of the bloodthirsty Pol Pot. That, by the way, was also a genocide, because "genocide" (to the surprise of the mayor of Madrid and those who think like him) is not a term that anyone has exclusive rights to, but rather the practice of exterminating the population of a place. In Cambodia, the totalitarian frenzy to create a "new society" led to the murder of all those deemed unworthy of being part of it. Between 1975 and 1978, between 1.5 and 2.2 million people were murdered, and official data speak of some twenty thousand mass graves scattered throughout the country.

Six more victims of Franco's war crimes have been identified in the Balearic Islands as a result of the exhumations carried out in the Son Coletes cemetery in Manacor and the San Francisco Javier cemetery in Formentera, during the campaigns carried out between 2020 and 2023 under the previous progressive Balearic Government. These are Bartomeu Fornés Bordoy, Serafín Vives Servera, and Gabriel Picornell Femenias, found in Manacor. In Formentera, the identities of the remains correspond to Francisco Delgado Machío, Antonio Sánchez Capilla, and Manuel Gordillo Vega, both from Extremadura. With these, there are now sixty-seven victims of fascism identified in the Balearic Islands, although it is certain that there are many more. You can find information about who each of them were. in the news of the Ara Balears. It should be noted that the interventions were carried out by teams from the Aranzadi Atics company, and that the identifications were made possible through the analysis and comparison of genetic profiles carried out by the Biomics laboratory at the University of the Basque Country, the ancient and modern DNA laboratory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the Genomics Service at Pompeu Fabra University.

Six more victims of Franco's war crimes have been identified in the Balearic Islands as a result of the exhumations carried out in the Son Coletes cemetery in Manacor and the San Francisco Javier cemetery in Formentera, during the campaigns carried out between 2020 and 2023 under the previous progressive Balearic Government. These are Bartomeu Fornés Bordoy, Serafín Vives Servera, and Gabriel Picornell Femenias, found in Manacor. In Formentera, the identities of the remains correspond to Francisco Delgado Machío, Antonio Sánchez Capilla, and Manuel Gordillo Vega, both from Extremadura. With these, there are now sixty-seven victims of fascism identified in the Balearic Islands, although it is certain that there are many more. You can find information about who each of them were. in the news of the Ara Balears. It should be noted that the interventions were carried out by teams from the Aranzadi Atics company, and that the identifications were made possible through the analysis and comparison of genetic profiles carried out by the Biomics laboratory at the University of the Basque Country, the ancient and modern DNA laboratory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the Genomics Service at Pompeu Fabra University.