Uncovering the concentration camp's past
Excavation underway at one of Spain’s harshest postCivil War lockups
WORK to locate mass graves and human remains from the Franco regime’s concentration camp in San Isidro began on Sunday and is due to take several weeks.
The camp, located in an area which was part of Albatera at the time, housed approximately 20,000 prisoners – many of them refugees from Alicante port who had been unable to escape into exile during the final hours of the Republic in 1939.
It is considered to have been one of the harshest camps in Spain at the end of the Civil War. According to several testimonies, ‘ someone died every day for different reasons’.
The excavation project director, archaeologist and historian Felipe Mejías explained they intend to ‘ define the exact boundaries of the camp, which could have been about 700 metres long and 200 wide’.
As well as recovering any human remains they find, they hope to be able to identify them, he said.
There is ‘ hardly any historical documentation’ about the thousands of prisoners, and ‘ it is not known exactly how many people there were or their names’, Sr Mejías told state news agency EFE.
For several years he has been researching the site, where nowadays there are pomegranate and palm tree groves.
“The only remaining building is a brick hut that used to be the camp’s bakery,” he said.
He started by interviewing landowners, two or three of whom assured that while working in the 1950s they had found human remains including skulls with scalps on. In the 1970s, when they went to install pipes to collect saltwater from the ground, they found complete human bodies a metre and a half down.
Having already spent several years identifying Civil War and postwar mass graves
in Alicante province ( when ones were discovered in Monóvar, Orihuela and Albatera town), Sr Mejías knew he could find one here.
Aerial photos from the 1940s will help to define the space and five archaeologists have begun intensive excavation of the whole plot.
They will be earthmoving and using metal detectors for two weeks, trying to recover items such as ‘ bullets and projectiles’ from the period.
For the third and final week, a heritage detection team from Cádiz university will join in with a groundpenetrating radar.
They will cover the whole site in order to locate the mass grave before an excavator machine is brought in to do the required digging.
The project is subsidised with € 17,600 from the regional government department for democratic quality.