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In the early 20th century, Europe was fractured by rising nationalism and entered one of the most violent periods in its history. While Spain escaped the horrors of the first world war, by the early 1930s, tensions were mounting between the leftist Republicans and an alliance of nationalist parties. In February 1936, the nationalists lost the election to the Republicans by a handful of votes and launched a kudita, beginning one of the darkest chapters in Spanish history. In April 1939, the nationalists led by General Francisco Franco emerged the victors of a civil war which had claimed half a million victims.
Posing an authoritarian regime on his country, the dictator would wield absolute power until his death in 1975. Flying over Spain today, we can see the still open wounds of the civil war and the extent to which Franco's grip on his people left his mark on the country. José Luis, I have been studying the Spanish Civil War for almost 20 years and I have truly never seen it this way. From the sky, it looks very different than in libraries, in archives, or even when talking to those who lived through it and are still alive. Franco andou la kudita fromocimend from atheist communism. The nationalist troops landed in the south. Several garrisons in the country quickly rallied their cause. In three days, Franco and his puchists had triumphed in Seville and
taken a large sve of the north of the country from Galithia Tanavara. The divided country plunged into civil war. Hitler's Nazi party and Mussolini's fascist regime didn't take long to show their support for Franco. While the USSR delivered cutting edge military equipment to the Republican forces, Franco unified his troops under the egis of an authoritarian ideology, founding an organization called the Falange. He made advances into Republican territory, but in late April 1937, he was blocked by a resistance movement in the northwest of the country.
Determined to take the strategic town of Bilbao, Franco on his new assistance We are approaching Guernica. It was a Monday morning, April 26, 1937, when German and Italian aircraft, with the agreement, of course, and the knowledge of Franco's troops, bombed this Basque city. The exact number of victims of that terrible bombing is still unknown, but it is estimated to be in the hundreds. Well, from here, from the air, we can clearly see that the strategic value of Guernica was very small; it was only one of the possible access routes to Bilbao within the framework of the Francoist offensive. The value of Guernica was above all historical,
cultural, and identity-related, due to its importance to Basque identity. German and Italian bombs flattened the town. When the dust finally settled, Gueneka was just a pile of ruins. But two precious symbols are still standing today. One is the ancient Bask Parliament and the other is the Oak of Guika, under which generations of kings and Spanish rulers swore oaths to uphold the laws of the region. was important as a resistance, what happened is that they took it because it was a very important town within the Basque Country. I used to work there, the bank where I was down there. And from there, with the gentleman who was accompanying me, we came this way. We went up those stairs and came in here to the square.
And when we were there, approximately, the first bombs were heard. All the people who were here in the market ran to the shelters. I, of course, was small and they pushed me and put me in one of them. They had the sandbags here to put the shelters in, and that's where I was. There behind those sacks during the bombing. I didn't see what was happening. We heard the explosions, the noise scared me, the heat arrived, the explosions, the planes came, they dropped the bombs, they came back, they crossed with others that were coming and we
were like that for 3 and a half hours. It felt like it would last forever to me. We had been told at church that in case of danger of death we should say a certain prayer, so I started, I don't know, 100, 200 times, but the explosions stopped me and I started again. And when I came out from behind those sacks, I saw the town was surrendering. Vernica, in peacetime it had 5000 and something inhabitants, that is, they kicked us out almost one for every indignation. and then they rained down on us fire, blood and death, but they did not see us as we were because they were above and we were below. And if they had been down there, they would have seen that we were children like the children of
their village, like their own children or their little brothers. But they didn't see us that way. From the outpost, they saw us as ants running in terror. Of course, ants and men cannot talk to each other. represent Seeing it from here, one can perfectly understand what some of the testimonies of those who lived through the war on the Aragon Front were saying. It is a fundamentally arid area and it was really difficult to maintain defenses that covered about 300 km. The descriptions, for example, of George Orwell, the British writer, author of 1984, who writes a book of testimony about his experience on the Aragon Front and describes it in these terms: dirt, mud, heat in summer, cold in winter, [__], boredom, misery.
At the end of the summer in 1937, the Republicans launched a series of counter offensives, taking back some small villages and unoccupied territory. But they encountered during campaign. In the summer of '37, this area, and Belchite in particular, was crossed by a Republican offensive that was trying to reach Zaragoza and which had its bloodiest battle right here. On the 24th of August, the determined Republicans were on the offensive again. Two weeks later, they just ruined. Well, here we are in the ruins of the old town of Bechitec. What we used to see from above, from the sky, we now have to imagine. As it was in reality, full of people, uh, buying, selling, carrying out
their agricultural activities, exploiting the land, the olive trees inside this church, the church of San Agustín, or strolling through the ruins, one might think that we are looking at ruins from prehistory or from distant times. However, these are buildings that people lived in until just two generations ago. There are still people alive today in Belchite, in the new town of Belchite, who were born, who got married, who were baptized in this church or who walked, played through all the streets we are crossing. Bank's favor with the aid of new plans and equipment inserted troops drive through north of Tero towards Barcelona. On the 7th of March 1938, with the material support of Germany and Italy,
Franco launched tax across the whole of Aragon and Belchita back. What makes the case of Belchite unique and singular is not only the ferocity of the battle, but also the fact that Franco's dictatorship, within a strategy of propaganda and memory politics, chose not to rebuild the ruins of this town, but instead chose to leave the ruins and build a new town next to them. Hence that embrace between the new and the old, what was achieved by it? In a way, the Franco regime achieved with this the same thing it tried to do with other memory policies: to underline the idea of how ferocious, cruel, and murderous the Reds, the Republicans, had been. Hence, for decades this town was considered and referred to by
Francoist publications as a martyr town. On the 1 of April 1939 seed control of Madrid and officially Franco moved into Palace in Madrid had himself called Elod the chief and declared that the was hence the only political party allowed. SP on the 4th of September 1939, war broke out again in Europe, but Franco kept Spain neutral. It was time to rebuild the country. Imposing his own definition of Spanish culture, the dictator banned regional languages and traditions such as Catalan dance while arbitrarily promoting others like Flamenco.
From civilian to Madrid, even bull fighting was put to propaganda use by Franco. The dictator declared it the national sport, no doubt in the hope that the violence of the spectacle would stupefy the people and erase from their memory the horrors committed by his regime. A year after the civil waren lasting order. We are just over 25 km from Madrid. And you can already see the biggest vestige left by the civil war and its aftermath in Spain, eh, the Valley of the Fallen. The Valley of the Fallen is a gigantic mausoleum that Franco ordered to be built
And the objective was clear, a great mausoleum in memory of the fallen, those who fell for God and for Spain. The first significance was that, more than 33,000 corpses of those killed in the war that lie there, some of them without the consent of the relatives. After its inauguration, there was an attempt to redefine it so that it would be a place for the integration of everyone's memory, from both sides, but it never achieved this. He was worried about the threat posed by the war raging beyond Spain's borders. In 1944, the dictator ordered a vast defense system to be built along the northern border.
It represents a pharaonic and colossal waste of resources. We need to think about what the situation was like in Spain back then. a country ruined after 3 years of bloody civil war. Given these conditions, construction had to take place; many other much more urgent issues had to be set aside in order to carry out this pharaonic task of building a fortification line. As a little girl, Anna Lopez was fascinated by the strange little buildings hidden her. It has been considered a line of total psychosis, of invasion. As World War II progressed, the possibility of a Nazi Germany arose, although there were already sympathies with Franco in Endaya when Hitler and Franco met, but we see that later, at the end of World War II,
Nazi Germany disappeared from that enemy and then transformed itself with the Allies as well. So, there is still a kind of secrecy surrounding these forts, and we see that this line, when it began to be built in November of 1944, was built under military secrecy. It's a line more typical of a first world war, of trench warfare, more of hand-to-hand combat than of the end of the second world war. Because if that enemy had ever been considered for entry, since it was never used, they surely would have avoided it by going through the air or the sea. Allies were more concerned about the growing communist threat posed by the USSR.
Franco's fears eased and he abandoned the construction of his bunkers, but he maintained his iron grip on the Spanish people. And as the 1950s dawned, the dictator decided it was time to open Spain up to the outside world and stabilize its economy. Convinced that the root to Spain's economic prosperity lay in its potential as a destination approved constructions. We are now flying over the Mediterranean coast, especially the coast of the Valencian Community and Catalonia, which are the scene of one of the biggest social and economic changes that occurred during the Franco regime. 1956 he launched a first town planning operation widening the roads and building hotels. German, Dutch, and French holiday makers descended
all mass on this new seaside resort. In 1963 new construction regulations without any limits on height and became along the coast. In those approximately 20 years, the number of foreign tourists went from 1 million to almost 30 million, but all that glitters is not gold. The economic development it generated, which fueled tourism, accentuated inequalities and imbalances between different regions of the country. On the 20th of November 1975, Franco died and was buried in his morum, the valley of Los Kaidos. The new government undertook a large number of reforms aimed at opening up and modernizing society. But the country's war criminals were never brought to justice, and the transition to democracy went hand in hand
with an almost deliberate collective amnesia. In time, as the country became more secularized and joined the European Community, the Spanish people slowly began to break the silence of the post Franco era. In November 2002, the Spanish Parliament officially condemned Franco's dictatorship. The ophthalmic has seen some of the traces left by the civil war and its aftermath from the air. Well, there are many more, but perhaps the most significant are all those traces that are not visible. The Spanish landscape is dotted with
anonymous mausoleums. It is estimated that Spain is the second country after Cambodia, with the most mass graves and the most people buried in unknown places. of 120,000 victims buried in 2591 mass graves. Today more than 70 associations and thousands of volunteers throughout Spain devote themselves to the exumation of the country's tragic past. In the little village of Varaso in northwestern Spain, one of these mass graves has recently been uncovered. Santiago is the president of one of these associations which actively campaign for the victims.
I saw it during the Franco regime. I am missing 16 family members whose whereabouts we do not know, therefore, I don't know if it will ever be possible to find them, it will be very difficult, it will be very complicated and I was helped, my family was helped, now I help other people, that's why I am here. Right femur, remains of the pelvis, an apparently leather belt with a metal center, textile remains are, according to the documentation we have found, 37 victims of reprisals during the Spanish Civil War who were murdered between 1936 and 1949. The teeth are as if crossed, as if embraced, because the arm above is very good.
It's regrettable, it's shameful. Government non-participation does not encourage these things. Only 5% or perhaps less have been uncovered, and at the rate we're going, we'll need another 100 or 200 years to open them all. Well, when they are all opened in 100 years they will not exist because the bones are so degraded that there will be nothing and we don't know, we can't even know what relatives there are because it won't be possible to do DNA testing. So, we're still living under Franco's regime, huh? The legacy of the dictator still divides Spain today. Many believe it is still too early to reopen these wounds.
Yet daring to do what no previous administration had. In September 2018, the government voted through a bill for removing the dictators remaining from the Morilian. This symbolic decision is a victory for those who believe that in order to face their future, the Spanish people must come to terms with their past.
