The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory began in October 2000, when a small group of people gathered at the site of one of the Spanish Civil War’s bloodiest civilian massacres.

There, in the remote village of Priaranza del Bierzo, in Spain’s northern region of León, their mission was to locate and exhume a mass grave containing the remains of 13 Republicans, known to history as the Priaranza 13. They had been executed by a group of the Falange, the pro-Franco fascist movement, on 16 October 1936.

The exhumation broke the silence surrounding the fate of thousands of civilians executed during the 1936-39 Civil War and the 1939-75 Franco regime. It is estimated that 200,000 men and women were killed in extrajudicial executions during the War, and another 20,000 Republicans murdered by the regime in the post-war years. Thousands more died as a result of bombings, and in prisons and concentration camps.

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