On any given weekend, after driving almost 100 kilometers from the city of València, we arrived at the town of Benagéber, in the La Serranía region. Our purpose is to visit the swamp. An area where weekend getaways and outdoor activities have become very popular, and it is not surprising because the surroundings of Alto Turia are of great interest.
From the town, we take a simple and winding road—the CV390—that descends following the contour lines. A few minutes later, the sun’s rays on an extensive surface of water dazzle us. We have arrived. We are in the Benagéber reservoir.
The reservoir welcomes us with imposing architecture, stone blocks, sobriety and an aesthetic that refers to another era. The pharaonic dimension of the dam and the existence of attached buildings are impressive: a huge circular spillway, a large religious image and a cement factory. After the vertigo of facing the dam—105 meters of drop—we look up. A mountainous natural environment, surrounded by pine trees and a 722-hectare sheet of calm blue water, invites us to disconnect and relax.
We take the road again and return to higher levels. On the way, we have noticed disused work facilities and an area of small homes as a residential area. After a few minutes, we arrive at our final destination: the “Embalse de Benagéber Vacation Center”. We park the car and old buildings converted into a hostel surround us. We sat on the terrace of a swimming pool that, like a watchtower, allows us to have a privileged view of the Benagéber reservoir from above. And the questions become recurring: How? Who? Why was all this built? We are in a place where everything intrigues us, but we have arrived here with hardly any information that tells us its origin and its past. Only our interest and curiosity makes us discover some clues through information prepared by the Benagéber City Council.
Paraphrasing David Lowenthal, we can say that the past is something essential and inescapable. Without the past we would lack any identity – nothing would be familiar to us – and our present would have no meaning. It is often said that what is not remembered or told never happened. But the fact is that once things have happened, they always leave their traces. You just have to know how to track them and, in this, the social and human sciences are crucial. Sometimes, they have to be exhumed from the earth, other times they have to be searched in archives or discovered in the homes of the families who lived in them. What makes up our past history is fossilized in the materialities and also in the memories that make us what we are as individuals, as a country and as a society. That is why we must search, count and remember what has not always been explained. So, it will have to be told.
Living memory remembers how the dictator Francisco Franco, followed by a massive court of authorities and acolytes, inaugurated the Benagéber reservoir in 1952. Baptized as the Generalissimo Swamp, it was the highest dam in Spain at its time. However, the project to build this infrastructure on the Turia River had been born years before, in 1931, when the democratic regime of the second Spanish Republic developed the original construction project of what should have been the Blasco Ibáñez Reservoir. . Work began in 1934. Although, in 1936, with Franco’s coup d’état and the subsequent war, everything was paralyzed. It was in 1939, when in the new Spain of Franco, the works to achieve the project were resumed.
In a country torn apart by war, the dictatorship decided to use the prison population as forced labor, presenting this exploitation as a way to redeem the defeated and reinsert them into that new Spain. “Redemption of Penalties through Work” was born. Hundreds of thousands of people who had fought to defend republican legality and against the coup d’état ended up in prisons and concentration camps, victims of Franco’s court martial. Prison work detachments filled the Spanish State. Many public and private reconstruction and new infrastructure works (mines, roads, canals, ports and swamps) embody the memory of their work. This is the case of Benagéber where, between 1941 and 1944, more than half a thousand Republican prisoners were assigned to the construction of the reservoir. The story of the almost 600 political prisoners who worked on the construction sites, along with hundreds of other workers and their families, is a barely known episode in our recent history.
The first detachment of prisoners joined the construction work in Benagéber in 1941. Separated in simple barracks, which are still preserved, they worked in the swamp until October 1944. They lived away from their families, under permanent surveillance and forced to political-social and religious re-education in the principles of national Catholicism. They were assigned to hard manual work, with days—day and night—that could reach up to 18 hours a day. The construction of the swamp was carried out by hand, with pick and shovel work, wooden scaffolding, drilling with dynamite and clearing debris with carts moved by the workers themselves. The mechanization that we know today in the engineering and construction of this type of infrastructure was science fiction in post-war Spain. As were health and safety at work.
The dictatorship entrusted the works to the company Portolés y Cia and the construction officially ended in 1952. Currently, the reservoir and the remains of some facilities of the prison detachment and the workers’ colony are witnesses of this history and become an exceptional space to remember and explain this episode of our most recent past. With this purpose, it is born This swamp is inaugurated. Forced labor in Benagébera project coordinated by Acció Ciutadana against the Impunitat del Franquisme and sponsored by the Memory area of the Diputació de València. Under the scientific direction of the interdisciplinary team that presented in 2023 The secreted memory. Nazis in the Valencian Countrynew teaching material and an exhibition installation for educational centers have been developed, as well as a program of complementary activities open to the public. The project will be publicly presented on October 23 at the Col·legi Major Rector Peset of the University of Valencia with a series of conferences.
We live in a country where it is still scary and suspicious to talk about our uncomfortable heritages and traumatic pasts. However, we are surrounded by and still use many infrastructures (swamps, canals, dams, bridges, roads, railways, etc.) that encapsulate the history and memory of how the Franco dictatorship legitimized itself and survived four decades through repressive policies. , exclusive, ultraconservative and fascist. Perhaps Cuelgamuros (known as the Valley of the Fallen in Franco’s nomenclature) is one of the most high-profile examples. But there are many more Francoist monuments, infrastructures and new construction and reconstruction works that were made with the forced labor of political prisoners.
The work of research and dissemination of spaces and places of memory, especially those linked to episodes of violence and repression, does not intend to stigmatize these places or the municipalities in which they are located. Quite the contrary, since narrating these stories that have survived in the margins is one more way to know our history from an intergenerational perspective and to contribute to the development of cultural and educational actions.
This is the cornerstone of the project This swamp is inaugurated. Forced labor in Benagéberto re-visit with different eyes these spaces of repression—and also of resistance—to contribute to the scientific knowledge of history and the construction of democratic memory. The materials, activities and scheduled visits are the vehicle to explain the policies and dictatorial nature of Franco’s Spain and analyze the systemic repression of the dictatorship through the case study of the construction of the Benagéber reservoir and life in its prison detachment and its workers’ colony.
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