The Juan Negrín Foundation has published in its web 470 maps and sketches used by the Government of the Republic during the civil war, among which those handled by the general stand out Vicente Rojo in the Battle of the Ebro (1938), his last major offensive, material that for the most part had never been exhibited before.
In a statement, the foundation that guards the personal archive of the last president of the Government of the Republic explains that his desire is to make available to researchers, students and the general public the plans and other cartographic documents used by the chief of staff of the Republican Army.
With them, other documents are offered on the Internet, mostly belonging to the stage in which Juan Negrin He took charge of the Ministry of National Defense, a responsibility that he added to the presidency of the Council of Ministers from 1938.
The digitization and cataloging work of this cartographic collection has been possible thanks to the subsidies granted by the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and the Government of the Canary Islands and allows the Juan Negrín Foundation to fulfill two of the objectives for which it was created: conserve the Negrin Archive and make it known.
“With these works we fulfill our duty to protect the documents and also to work on the constant dissemination of what we have here, which is part of the History of Spain and the Canary Islands,” explains the president of the Juan Negrín Foundation, Jose Medina.
In the case of the plans used by the Army of the Republic in the Battle of the Ebro, it is mostly material that remained unpublished since the war, except for a small part that had already been revealed in the exhibition. Battle of the Ebro. Offensive and retreat on Cataloniaproduced by the Juan Negrín Foundation and exhibited at its headquarters in 2016.
Some of the pieces preserved in the Negrín Archive and corresponding to this battle are sheets of tracing paper on which the vicissitudes of the Republican offensive have been traced by hand and with colored pencils.
Prior to the 2016 exhibition, part of this material, which had not been unfolded in 70 years, was restored by specialists from the Cabildo of Gran Canaria.
The process that has just concluded began in June 2023 and has been possible thanks to the intervention of a multidisciplinary team of professionals, led by the specialists Selvi Hell and Eylin Blanco and made up of digitization technicians, archivists and documentarians who carried out the classification, cataloguing, digitization and editing tasks.
The cartographic collection that can now be consulted on the internet is made up of 142 sketches, seven plans, 311 mapssix map mosaics and six place profiles.
Users will be able to consult all the maps in PDF format and perform searches thanks to the assigned metadata: dates, dimensions, scales, places, and document type.
All maps uploaded to the network carry the watermark of the Juan Negrín Foundation.
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