The Ghosts of the Past

 

Spanish Republican prisoners

 I was listening to the Real Dictators podcast, specifically working through the episodes on Francisco Franco the Fascist dictator of Spain. I've gone through many books, articles and documentaries and feature films about the Spanish Civil War, but this one did cover some information that was new to me including an in-depth look at the collaboration between the British establishment and Franco and the other rebel Generals. 

Episode Four, revealed some information that genuinely caused me to hit the pause button and then rewind to listen with my complete attention. The segment documented the network of Concentration Camps Franco had built throughout Spain to break the will of the population. Victory on the battlefield does little to win hearts and minds, after all. It's a grim sequence of figures for deaths, slavery and executions. The part that shook me was the revelation that I had been to one of these Concentration Camps several times as youth. That it is because that camp is now the location of the Aqualand water park in Torremolinos. My family lived in Gibraltar so we got to know Andalusia quite well, Torremolinos was a regular holiday destination and the park was a welcome relief from the heat. My family have many anecdotes of misadventures there, the kind that's nostalgic and hilarious to us but boring to everyone else. 

 

One of the unearthed documents that prove the Camp existed.

But as you may suspect, there was no inkling that the site used to be a place of death and brutality. Which is not surprising if you're familiar with Spain, part of the aftermath of the transition from Francoismo to liberal democracy was that the state would leave sleeping dogs to lie. Spanish governemnts have not as a rule championed or officially endorsed Francoismo, and it has moved legislatively away from personalised dictatorship and toward liberal democracy and regional autonomy. Still, It very rarely gets involved in dealing directly with its past unless it has to. Official Francoist commemoration events take place annually in areas where the Franco cult remains strong, and it was not until 2019 that Franco's remains were removed from the Valley of the Fallen, a tomb dedicated to the war dead of the Civil War and while it contains bodies of Republican soldiers, it is dedicated using the Motto and other iconography of the dictatorship.

 

Before the removal of his body the site had become a place of pilgrimage for many Spanish and foreign far right groups.

 

So, the majority of the work of establishing the facts and the scale of the repression which may have included over 200,000 victims has been handled by the survivors and independent minded historians and journalists, who have done the lion's share of work uncovering the 700 and counting mass graves, and tracing the archipelago of state violence, its connections to the Spanish military and business world and of course the Catholic Church. The revelations that the Camp in Torremolinos did in fact exist was largely thanks to the work of the historian Carlos Blancos. 

 Until now. Local historian Carlos Blanco has found official documents that show the existence of the facility; these include a quartermaster's report, an administrative journal and an invoice. A budget from the Ministry of National Defence reveals that the Seville Treasury covered the expenses of this terrible service, with a daily cost of 1.65 pesetas per prisoner.

The documentation discovered by Blanco leaves no room for euphemisms despite years of attempts by the council to play down the facility. Former mayor Pedro Fernández Montes (PP) denied that there had ever been a concentration camp in Torremolinos - only a detention centre, which is not the same - and called the claim cliché during a council meeting in 2015. 

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This is rather typical of parts of Spain where the remembrance of the dead are especially inconvenient, the result is greatly uneven remembrance. There are parts of the country, especially in regions with their own language and identity, where the work of documentation, mourning and remembrance are quite extensive. In other parts where the Francoists were more popular, the work is far less prominent. Currently, Spain is in a weird state of flux were the atrocities of Franco are not denied outright, the former Mayor* for example did concede something happened in Torremolinos, but defenders of the dead regime will downplay and minimise and do their best to ignore the bad things, while loudly shouting about the supposed benefits of decades of brutal dictatorship**. 

I think overall the tide is shifting in the right direction, more evidence throughout the country is being unearthed, and it's harder and harder for the Spanish right to play dumb. While it took far too long, removing Franco's bones from a national monument where he took centre stage was also a positive symbolic step. Unfortunately this path is not guaranteed the Spanish right is still large and in the form of the right wing of the PP and the Vox party is much more open to embracing the Francoist past which was considered taboo in polite circles. If that movement succeeds in gaining momentum and coming to power, who knows what the future brings. 

 There is also another danger these malignant splinters of Francosimo pose to the international community. I have encountered both online and in the wild people who know nothing of Spain but have met a Spaniard who is a Francoist and bought wholesale the nonsense they spout. It's frustrating dealing with these gullible fools. So far it's relatively easy to put them on the back foot with simple references to the frequent execution by garroting, the time Basque nationalist sent Franco's Prime Minister into space, But a lie repeated often enough while not becoming the truth is believed to be by a greater number of people each time. The Spanish historians, journalists, survivors and family of survivors are doing fantastic work in dragging the secrets of the Spanish far right into the sunlight, I wish to support their efforts. 

 

Poster for the 1979 drama Operacion Ogro which covered the 1973 assassination.

*If you're curious, PP stands for the Partido Popular (People's Party) a Conservative party and the largest political party in Spain in 2026. 

** An example of this odd tension was the 2016 Cassandra case. 18-year-old Cassandra Vera Paz posted a series of tweets poking fun at the 1973 assassination of Prime Minister Blanco via car bomb, this is the event that's been commemorated as "Spain's first astronaut" in memes. Paz was found guilty of the crime of insulting the victims of terrorism, and sentenced to a year in prison. Eventually, Spain's Supreme Court overruled the sentence for a number of reason's including the fact that many people around the world have been making jokes about that assassination for decades.