SHARE
COPY LINK

HISTORY

Belchite: the open wound of Spain’s Civil War

Like many Spanish villages, Belchite was devastated by Spain's 1936-39 Civil War. But it is the only one which looks largely as it did at the end of the conflict, with piles of rubble strewn about, the clock tower barely standing and mass graves.

Belchite: the open wound of Spain's Civil War
Paleoanthropologist Jose Ignacio Lorenzo exhumes the remains of people killed between 1936 and 1939 during the Spanish Civil War in the Belchite cemetery, near Zaragoza on July 8th 2022. (Photo by CESAR MANSO / AFP)

“Here we found men, women and children,” said Ignacio Lorenzo, a 70-year-archaeologist as he exhumes the last skeletons from a mass grave in this village in the northern region of Aragon.

“Their crime was to have voted for left-wing parties or to be members of a union,” he said.

The siege of Belchite was part of a Republican offensive in 1937 to capture Zaragoza, the capital of Aragón, from the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.

Franco went on to win the war and establish a dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975.

The repression of Belchite by Nationalist forces at the start of the war resulted in the execution of 350 of its roughly 3,000 residents, according to witness testimony from survivors.

The grandparents of veteran Spanish singer Joan Manuel Serrat were among those killed.

Lorenzo and his team have so far found the remains of 90 missing Republicans in the cemetery, some of them with their hands and feet bound. Others displayed signs of having been tortured.

British historian Paul Preston, author of “The Spanish Holocaust”, estimates that 200,000 Spaniards were killed far from the front lines — 150,000 in areas controlled by Franco’s forces and the rest in Republican areas.

Franco’s regime honoured its own dead, but left its opponents buried in unmarked graves scattered across the country.

“There are still 114,000 disappeared,” mostly Republicans, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said earlier this week. Only Cambodia had more missing people, he added.

His government has drafted a law that, for the first time, will make exhumations of those who disappeared during the war a “state responsibility”. The bill faces its first parliamentary vote on Thursday.

Belchite was devastated during “the Battle of Belchite” in the Spanish civil war in a series of military operations confronting loyalist Spanish republicans and General Franco’s nationalists forces between August 24th and September 7th 1937. (Photo by CESAR MANSO / AFP)

‘Forget it’

Belchite was captured by Franco’s forces shortly after the start of the war, then taken over by the Republican camp a year later before being recaptured by the Nationalists.

The fighting left at least 5,000 dead and completely destroyed the village.

After the war, Franco visited Belchite and ordered it to be abandoned and preserved in its ruined states for propaganda reasons. A new village was built next door for the surviving residents.

The ruins of Belchite are now fenced off and can only be visited via a guided tour.

belchite spanish civil war

Volunteers from several countries work to clean up and restore the streets of the old town of Belchite. (Photo by CESAR MANSO / AFP)

“A rupture took place after the civil war, the past was left behind,” said Mari Angeles Lafoz, a socialist councilwoman in Belchite.

Domingo Serrano, the mayor of Belchite between 1983 and 2003, strove during his mandate to preserve what was left of the old village but lacked any real means.

He himself was born in 1946 in “old Belchite”, in one of the few houses that had survived the war.

“We let it go downhill,” said Serrano. “It’s as if we thought it was better to forget it.”

But the €7 million ($7.0 million) recently earmarked by the government for “old Belchite” were coming “40 years too late,” he said.

View of the village of Belchite, south of Zaragoza, which was totally destroyed in battle in August 1937. Following the battle Franco ordered that the ruins be left untouched as a “living” monument of war. (Photo by CIFRA / AFP)

‘Sensitive issue’

The ruins of Belchite — which include a cathedral pockmarked with bullet holes and gouged by mortar shells — were visited by 40,000 people in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted travel.

It has been dubbed “Spain’s Pompeii”, after the Roman city frozen in time when it was buried under ash from a volcanic eruption in 79 AD, said archaeologist Alfonso Fanjul.

The 48-year-old president of the Spanish Association of Military Archaeology heads a team of volunteers from around the world who clean and restore the village’s original cobblestones.

“I think it’s really one of the only places in the world that can this starkly remind you of something that has happened like this,” said one volunteer, Ellie Tornquist, a 24-year-old student from Chicago in the United States.

But the civil war continues to divide Spain.

While leftwing parties want to rehabilitate the memory of the Republican victims of the conflict, the right accuses them of seeking to open the wounds of the past.

The current mayor of Belchite, Carmelo Pérez of the conservative Popular Party, admits the war is a “very sensitive issue”.

But the village “is a unique place in Spain” where we can “restore dignity” and create a place of peace, he said.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

DISCOVER SPAIN

The towns in Spain where it was illegal to die

When cemeteries were filling up in towns around southern Spain a few years ago, some mayors turned to extreme measures to keep their towns alive.

The towns in Spain where it was illegal to die

Ah, the Spaniards. To outsiders they can sometimes appear like chain-smoking, meat loving hedonists for whom a caña or glass of tinto is never out of the question. And yet, they outlive the majority of the world.

In fact, a 2021 study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted that Spain would surpass Japan to boast the world’s longest life expectancy by 2040. According to Spain’s main stats body (INE), by 2050 Spaniards will be nearing a life expectancy of 90.

It’s hard to fully understand why Spaniards live so long, but scientists generally seem to have come to the consensus that it’s something to do with the combination of their Mediterranean diet (and weather too, no doubt), a good healthcare system, plenty of walking, a close-knit society, and a helpful serving of hedonism — in moderation, of course.

Genetics, a love of sport as well as the lack of serious social issues (in recent decades, anyway) and involvement in wars also likely played a role in making Spaniards live longer. Additionally, over the past decades Spain also managed to drastically reduce the number of deaths due to cardiovascular diseases.

Imagine if they cut down on drinking and smoking — Spaniards could no doubt live even longer. However there were, in the not so distant past, some towns in Spain that took life expectancy to another level and actually made it illegal to die.

READ ALSO: In which parts of Spain do people live longest?

Yes, you read that right: there were towns in Spain where it was made illegal to die.

In 1999 in the Andalusian province of Granada, the mayor of Lanjarón, José Rubio, issued an order banning his 3,870 residents from dying.

The reason? There was no room for anyone else in the cemetery. As you might imagine, this strange decree got a lot of attention, and even made the pages of the New York Times as the news went around the world. However, just a week later, a neighbour broke the rules and died.

The offender was a 91-year-old man (and rather awkwardly, a friend of the mayor) so they were forced to bury him in the already overflowing Lanjarón cemetery. Fortunately, there were no repercussions for the dead man or his family, nor for the rest of the locals who eventually ‘broke’ the ban on dying.

Then a few years later, in July 2002, Manuel Blas Gómez, the mayor in Darro (also in Granada) pulled a similar trick made a public order: “Prohibido morirse” (“It is forbidden to die”). He had only been mayor for a few months, and he took the decision to veto death in this town of 1,500 locals.

The bizarre order was made for similar reasons as in Lanjarón, namely that the town’s cemetery had no more usable land and although local government had found a plot of land to build a new one, the municipal coffers did not have the money needed for the construction works.

But it’s not only in Spain where dying has been outlawed. Both Cugnaux and Sarpourenx in France and Biritiba Mirim in Brazil have done the same in the past for the same reason — because their local cemeteries were full.

READ ALSO: Did you know…? There’s a town in Italy where it’s illegal to die

Since 2012 it’s been illegal to die in the Italian town of Falciano del Massico in Campania, about 30 miles north of Naples.

Mayor Giulio Cesare Fava banned the village’s residents from going “beyond the boundaries of earthly life, and… into the afterlife” after the town’s cemetery reached full capacity.

Again, as in Spain residents were ordered not to die at least until Falciano’s administrators had time to construct a new cemetery that could house their earthly remains.

SHOW COMMENTS