Digging up the past in Catalonia

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why is troubled Catalonia now opening up civil war mass graves?

Spain has the second largest amount of mass graves in the world after Cambodia. Over 100,000 people disappeared during the 1930s civil war and the ensuing Franco dictatorship. Decades later, the vast majority are still unaccounted for.

Forgetting Spain's painful past and the disappeared is what allowed democracy and peace to flourish, the argument has long gone.

But many have not forgotten - including in the region of Catalonia, where bitter memories of Franco’s rule are just beneath the surface. Before Madrid imposed direct rule last October, the pro-independence Catalan government began an unprecedented plan to excavate civil war mass graves and collect DNA from families looking for their lost relatives.

Estelle Doyle travels to the politically troubled region and finds out how, despite direct rule, those seeking answers are more determined than ever to recover the past and to confront Spain's painful history. Others worry that their actions will only but reopen old wounds and further divide the country.

Presenter: Estelle Doyle Producer: John Murphy

Photo credit: BBC John Murphy - 'Exhuming a mass grave in El Soleras, Catalonia, Spain' **This podcast has been changed: Correction: El Soleras is in the West of Catalonia, while Catalonia itself is in the North East of Spain**

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:04.0	Thank you for downloading this program.
0:06.0	Now you may remember that last year in 2017,
0:10.0	the Spanish government in Madrid took over control of Catalonia from the regional government,
0:15.0	which was calling for independence.
0:17.0	And months later there are few signs that the political crisis is over.
0:22.0	But the battle isn't just about politics, it's also
0:25.5	about history and how to remember the past, especially the Civil War years.
0:31.6	My colleague is still Doyle has been unearthing Catalonia's past.
0:37.0	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Estelle Doyle.
0:51.0	It's just after 8 a.m. in El Soleras, a small town in Catalonia in the north of Spain.
0:56.0	And already a team of archaeologists and anthropologists is busy excavating a mass grave.
0:59.0	So there are three women here kneeling down.
1:04.0	Two of them are very, very carefully scraping the earth of bones.
1:10.0	And another one with a little brush is further cleaning them.
1:15.0	There are quite a lot of bones here.
1:17.8	Oh yes, here you can almost identify a body starting
1:22.2	to emerge from the earth. You can recognize the ribs, the legs, the pelvis.
1:29.3	The bodies belong to people who disappeared during Spain's Civil War in the 1930s.
1:35.0	We try to see, first of all, how they were buried if it was carefully or not.
1:41.8	We find injuries so that we can reconstruct what happened.
1:47.1	Diego Lopez is a young bearded man with a woolly hat. He's one of the anthropologists working here.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.