Delete
Archaeologists are carrying out initial surveys to locate the grave. SUR
'We expect to find around 100 bodies of victims of the Franco dictatorship'
History

'We expect to find around 100 bodies of victims of the Franco dictatorship'

Archaeologists are searching for a mass grave in the municipal cemetery of Campillos, a town in the north of Malaga province

Alba Tenza

Campillos

Friday, 28 June 2024, 12:12

For more than 50 years the people of Campillos, a town in the north of Malaga province, have been calling for efforts to be made to find the location of a mass grave containing bodies of victims of the Franco dictatorship.

For the last year a team of archaeologists, coordinated by Malaga University lecturers María José Berlanga and Encarnación Barranquero, have been working on a project aimed at providing some answers for local people.

José Carlos Escalante is from Teba but has regularly visited Campillos over the last 15 years and since then has heard much said about the subject. Now he is one of the archaeologists working on the project and has recently been carrying out the first archaeological surveys in the local cemetery. The aim is to locate and assess the state of conservation of the mass grave in the area.

"Relatives have given us clues as to the possible location of the grave near the entrance to the local cemetery," said a researcher

"We expect to find around a hundred bodies of victims of the dictatorship, although we haven't got an exact figure yet, but according to the initial studies we've made we think it will be more or less that amount," the researcher told SUR.

The project does not only want to physically recover the buried history of Campillos, but also provide a sense of closure to the local community. It has been the relatives of the victims of repression during the Franco regime who have provided the archaeologists with clues.

"They told us it could be near the entrance to the cemetery," said Escalante.

"There could be people buried there dating back to when the first [of Franco's] rebels arrived in the town," he added.

Esta funcionalidad es exclusiva para suscriptores.

Reporta un error en esta noticia

* Campos obligatorios

surinenglish 'We expect to find around 100 bodies of victims of the Franco dictatorship'