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ARCHIVED - Aguilas to commemorate Civil War victims in municipal cemetery

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The remains of 42 victims have been located in 14 unmarked graves in Águilas

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Aguilas to commemorate Civil War victims in municipal cemetery It is now 83 years since the end of the Spanish Civil War and the number of people who remember the years of bloody conflict has dwindled considerably, but still the matter of how to commemorate those who lost their lives is a very touchy and controversial one.

In this context the Town Hall of Águilas has announced that the victims of the war are to be commemorated in the municipal cemetery by the installation of a plaque, recalling for posterity those who were buried in mass graves as a result of the “Civil War and the dictatorship”.

As recently as 2020 the Federation of Historical Memory Associations in the Region of Murcia launched a project to catalogue all of the mass graves resulting from the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, attempting to fill a historical void which had led to only six such sites being listed in the entire Region. That figure has now risen to over 300 graves containing the remains of more than 1,300 victims, many of them in and around the cities of Murcia and Cartagena but with others in practically all parts of the Region.

In Águilas the catalogue has been compiled by Amanecer 31, led by Pedro Javier López with the help of archaeologist Miguel Mezquida, and so far 42 victims have been located in 14 graves. There are no plans for any exhumations, and in most cases relatives and descendants have no idea that there recent ancestors were buried in this way.

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