Jávea air raid shelter to become Civil War museum

A WAR museum is to be set up in an air raid shelter found in the cliff face in Jávea's Caleta del Puerto area after nearly two years spent excavating it.

The bunker was built in 1938, a year before the end of Spain's Civil War, and once it was no longer needed to protect residents from bombs, it was redeployed as a fishermen's storage unit.

The shelter had been empty and in disuse for around 40 years when it was rediscovered in March 2016, covered in so many layers of weeds that the council's ar- chaeology and biology team have only just finished clearing them away.

Parts of the bunker are perfectly conserved, although other parts were in a poor state until recently – tunnels had collapsed and the façade was cracked and had to be propped up.

Jávea intends to apply for European Union regional development funds, managed by the Valencian government, to restore the air raid shelter and turn it into a Civil War museum.

Visitors will enter via a sixmetre gallery which forks into two, and audio-visual footage will reveal the full horrors of the wartime bombardments by Nazi Germany's Condor legion and Fascist Italy planes.

Jávea port was a strategic target in the Civil War, and in July 1938, the aerodrome on what is now the Avenida del Pla was blown up in an air raid.

Otherwise, Jávea escaped any other bomb damage during the bloodthirsty conflict.

The shelter in the port area is the only one left standing in Jávea, since the rest – in the Muntanyar district – were demolished in the 1980s.