In a straight line, there are no more than 500 meters that separate the Municipal Pavilion of Santa Isabel from one of the universal centers of Christianity, the Praza do Obradoiro in Santiago de Compostela, where the cathedral supposedly houses the tomb of the apostle. On foot you can explore them in five minutes. The myth and the forgotten reality in just half a kilometer: the site that today occupies the busy public sports complex, which has an indoor pool, gym and courts, was occupied, until 1973, by a military barracks. At that time it was in ruins, but between 1939 and 1946 it was one of the most populated prisons in the concentration camp universe of the first Franco regime. Neighbors and historians have now counted on the City Council to install a monolith in the vicinity and try to stop the area from being a “place of amnesia.”
Some 1,500 people, 98 or 99% political prisoners, came to occupy the facilities in 1940. They came mainly from Levante and the eastern provinces of Andalusia, the last regions of the peninsula to fall under the fascist boot. Day laborers, liberal professionals, above all. Some Galician, but testimonial. There is only specific data from that year, which was preserved in the city’s Municipal Archive and in which they appeared as “1,500 passers-by.” “That is the still photo of the prison,” Professor Antonio Míguez Macho, dean of the Faculty of Geography and History of Santiago de Compostela and member of the Histagra research group, one of the promoters of recovering this memory, tells elDiario.es. , “because the penitentiary information of the Franco regime”, especially in that initial period of the dictatorship, “is very fragmentary. There were only a few loose chips in the barracks.”
What specialists know best is the history of the building, built in the 18th century and of value within the so-called military architecture. Over the centuries, it functioned intermittently as a barracks. The conditions were not the best: humid and cold, surrounded by two rivers, the Sarela and the Sapos. In fact, in 1925, during the Primo de Rivera regime, the military moved to the Pazo do Hórreo – current headquarters of the Parliament of Galicia – and the Santa Isabel barracks, also called dos Sapos barracks, remained inactive. During the years of the Republic it suffered a fire. Even during the Civil War, with Galicia subjected to the uprisings from almost the beginning, the coup side did not use it. The prison in which they imprisoned democrats, workers and legitimate representatives of the left was then on the ground floor of the Pazo de Raxoi – currently the headquarters of the local government and some departments of the Xunta de Galicia –, in Obradoiro itself, opposite to the cathedral. The feared Falcona.
“It is the Falcona inmates themselves who, forced to do forced labor, are in charge of converting the Santa Isabel barracks into a prison starting in 1939,” says Míguez Macho, “the Republican defeat made the Franco regime need larger penitentiary spaces. ”. In 1940, the fascist administration elevated Santa Isabel to a central prison, which gave it greater importance within Franco’s repressive system, and placed it as one of the largest in Galicia. There is no documentation of who directed it. “There is a huge void in the world of jailers. But in a universal language, what was there was a concentration camp,” argues Míguez Macho, “facilities that were intended to release important contingents of the imprisoned population.” A few kilometers from Santiago there was another, Lavacolla, whose inmates built – again with forced labor – the airport runways. There is a thesis, by Rafael García Ferreiro, that studies Franco’s violence in Santiago de Compostela.
Help from neighbors to prisoners
Convicts from the last resistant provinces arrived in Santa Isabel, as has already been said. “Many suffered a prison journey,” he explains, “Franco’s policy was one of dispersion. “I wanted to separate the prisoners from their area of origin, and not have them stay in the same place for too long.” The situation in the barracks, “Dantesque”. Some testimonies corroborated this. For example, that of Francisco Bejarano, a doctor born in Valladolid, a member of the Communist Party, sentenced to death and pardoned, who had passed through the Trasancos concentration camp, in A Guarda, and who, after his release, completed in 1945 , settled in Ourense. “He himself cared for other prisoners during his stay in Santa Isabel,” recalls Míguez Macho, “and reported a situation of widespread hunger, health problems, two, three or four deaths a day due to starvation or disease.”
The total number of people who died in Santa Isabel is not known. What’s more, it is difficult to even calculate how many prisoners died in Franco’s prisons. “Inmates are victims of the same violence as those shot or paraded, for which there is a more reliable estimate,” the historian argues. Histagra, the research group of the University of Santiago de Compostela of which it is a part, is currently coordinating the preparation of a state census of victims, commissioned by the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory and in compliance with the law on the matter. approved in 2022.
The “traumatic memory” of Saint Isabel – as Míguez Macho describes it – had practically dissolved. “The decision to move the prison from Raxoi also meant expelling it from the city, hiding its presence,” he considers. It was 500 meters, but, at that time, it meant going from the heart of the historic center to an open field. The closest neighbors were in the Vista Alegre neighborhood. They were the ones who provided some type of aid to the inmates, blankets, food. None of them had family or friends nearby. When the Franco regime closed the prison in 1946, there were 1,000 prisoners surviving inside.
World War II had ended and Franco was interested in cleaning up his external image. The dictatorship was repositioned on the international board at the same time that the blocks of the Cold War were being drawn. “There were then many pardons with two objectives: to reduce the prison population and clean up the image of the country,” he says, “because it had been an ally of Nazism and Italian fascism.” Once its tenants were released or transferred to other prisons, the Santa Isabel barracks was never used again. Local children played in the mysterious abandoned building. In the 1960s, the first municipal soccer stadium, also named Santa Isabel, was built on an adjacent property. In 1973, the barracks succumbed to the winds of technocratic developmentalism and its pickaxe. “It was the end of the Franco regime, and the regime wanted to get rid of a certain more turbulent past,” Míguez Macho understands.
The idea of erecting a monolith in the place was promoted by the neighborhood platform of the Galeras neighborhood. Histagra joined the initiative. The last three municipal governments – of Compostela Aberta, of the Socialist Party and of BNG with Compostela Aberta – assumed it as their own and a few weeks ago it was inaugurated by Mayor Goretti Sanmartín. Representatives of all municipal groups attended. “We wanted that place of amnesia to become a place of democratic memory,” summarizes the historian.
#dark #memory #Santa #Isabel #Francoist #concentration #camp #meters #cathedral #Santiago
