Standing in a muddy field north of Madrid, 83-year-old Jose Luis Cubo watched forensic scientists dig into the soil where his grandfather once helped bury two men shot at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

The pit in farmland near the village of Vegas de Matute, around 75 km from the capital, is believed to hold the remains of either Luis Garcia Hernandez, a 42-year-old teacher and union member, or 60-year-old road worker Julio Maroto Ortega. Activists from the Historic Memory Recovery Association say both were executed by fascist forces and dumped in the countryside.

Cubo says his grandfather, Lorenzo, saw a truck from the Falange militia pull up, then heard shots ring out. Locals waited for nightfall before gathering the bodies and burying them in the fields they would keep farming for decades.

"This area was known as the death zone," Cubo recalled. "We continued to cultivate and harvest it. And where we thought they were buried, the wheat grew much more than around it."

The scene in Vegas de Matute is part of a broader effort that began with victim associations in 2000 and was later taken up by the Socialist-led government after 2018. The push aims to reopen old graves, recover remains from the 1936-39 conflict and Franco’s nearly 40-year rule, and give families a chance at closure.

Spain remains sharply divided over how to handle that legacy. Franco’s death 50 years ago paved the way for a transition to democracy and, eventually, membership of the European Union and NATO. But arguments over how far to go in revisiting past abuses continue to colour political debate.

There is no official count of those who disappeared during the civil war and dictatorship. In 2008, former High Court judge Baltasar Garzon put the likely number at around 114,000.

Officials now say time and development have made many of those cases impossible to resolve. State Secretary for Democratic Memory Fernando Martinez Lopez told Reuters the government believes only about 20,000 of the missing can still be recovered, as road building and other works have covered or destroyed many sites.

So far, around 9,000 bodies have been found. Authorities hope to exhume the rest of the recoverable victims over the next four years. Only 700 have been positively identified, but Martinez argues that everybody brought up from a mass grave has value, even when its name is lost. Those that cannot be identified are moved from anonymous pits to formal memorials.

"Every mass grave we open, it's a wound that we close," he said, as workers in Vegas de Matute carefully brushed soil from human bones that had lain hidden beneath the harvest for nearly nine decades.

 

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Spain Spain civil war graves exhumations