by Florence Boyle

Next year construction work on Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will finish, 144 years after it started.  In July 2026, still in Barcelona, it will be the 90^th anniversary of the Army uprising, one of the triggers for the Spanish Civil War.

The odds are that in civic Spain one event will receive more attention than the other. Legislation passed after Franco’s death bound the country to officially forget the sins on both sides. George Orwell, who fought in the war wrote’If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. But in Spain there is no room for reflection and no official reckoning for the wrongs.

Even the Hop on, Hop off bus tour in Barcelona makes no mention of the civil war or the landmarks connected to the conflict.  The Spanish national broadcaster TVE recently produced a map of 6,000 graves where tens of thousands are buried, and concluded that that no one in Spain lives more than 50 kilometres from a mass grave. Commentators fear that even reporting like that will disappear if a more right-wing government wins the 2027 general election.

Unusually in a civil war, there were international combatants, many persuaded that the conflict in Spain was a last stand against fascism in Europe.  But it is a complicated story.

Here at home, there is continuing, enthusiastic interest in the Spanish Civil War. The intelligence among local historians is that any event in whatever way related to the Spanish Civil War guarantees a full house because somewhere in a lot of family histories are stories of someone among them who picked a side.

Florence Boyle is treasurer of Open House.

Photo: Memorial to volunteers: La Pasionara statue in Glasgow. Wikimedia Commons