From a pavilion of reprisals for Franco to a cafeteria. Of a patio where Republican prisoners were shot at a pedestrian step. Of horror and death to reeds and meat cakes. The Old Prison of Murcia, a penalty where more than 500 Republicans were shot between 1939 and 1948, is being reconvirt at a museum of contemporary art and in a restaurant. In just over five years, the memory contained in this prison has been diluted: the walls, symbol of the suffering of the imprisoned, have been demolished.
“The walls are the element that gives us the idea of prison, they are what wasolated the prisoners of society; If they are demolished, over time it will be stopped knowing what that building meant. ” Speak Rufino Garrido. His father, José, spent three years in the Provincial Prison of Murcia between November 1939 and October 1942. The same happened with the Murcia shooting field, witness of shooting, and which is currently a shopping center.
The old prison is in the corner between General Primo de Rivera Avenue and the Plaza Circular. It is the most central area of the capital, which vertebra the rest of the areas of the city: “There are other more suitable sites to make urban improvement actions. The Barcelona model prison is in the center of the city, but they have not occurred to them to do something like that, ”reproaches the spokesman for the Association for the Conservation of the Heritage of the Huerta de Murcia (Huermur), Sergio Pacheco.
A decade ago, this battle association for the Old Prison of Murcia, the former provincial prison, to be classified as a place of democratic memory and pays tribute to the inmates and adjusted inside its walls during the Franco regime. “We have tried on all the ways,” says his spokesman Sergio Pacheco in a telephone interview.
The Secretary of State of Democratic Memory has urged the Murcia City Council on Tuesday to paralyze the demolition works of the Wall of Internal Pavilion of the Vieja prison. A pull of ears that came the same day that the excavating machines began to demolish them within a rehabilitation project of the building to generate a pedestrian space that would result from eliminating the old prisoner courtyard, as already took with the administrative building.
“National embarrassment”
“It has been a national embarrassment,” laments Huermur spokesman: “Let us know, it is the first town hall that dares to start demolishing part of a building initiated and protected as democratic memory.” Pacheco positively values the ministry resolution but -afea- “could have arrived before because we had already warned that the project was in a tender phase in August, and we communicated it again in December with a new brief of allegations” when the contract of there was Formalized and the machinery was already inside.
The machines on Tuesday gave time to demolish between 20 and 30 meters of wall. “We are going to ask that the rubble do not leave the prison, and that that part of the wall is rebuilt,” says Pacheco. Tuesday’s demolition are not, he explains, like those of 2018 because they have already been made with the Law on Democratic Memory in force. “It is another starting point and you have to reconstitute the damage.” And he warns that if there is no positive response, “the judicial way will be followed to be a judge to pronounce.”
“It seems to us a recklessness that the City Council began the works yesterday morning (on Tuesday), not only those of the inside area, but the demolition of the walls, without having expected that resolution, the precautionary protection is pending” , reproaches the socialist municipal group of Murcia.
“The original reform project of the old prison prepared by the Popular Party included the emptying of the entire building and the demolition of all walls,” they recall from the PSOE in the City of Murcia. For two years, between 2021 and 2023, the Socialists and Citizens ruled in the Consistory after a motion of censure against the popular: “When the new government team entered in the year 2021 [PSOE y Ciudadanos] A modified of the second phase of the project was made, where a series of elements to be conserved was established because of the historical memory: the east wing cells, the Panoptic, a series of the vis a vis a vis, and so on. This is the project that the City Council is running right now, ”they defend.
“Serrano’s team [PSOE] He spent two years at the City Council; He had in his hand to stop the project and did not do so, ”says Elvira Medina, secretary of Podemos in the Consistory capital. “What we have said is that we did not agree that the old prison became a space of contemporary art. [El PSOE] I could have avoided it, ”he says.
For Pacheco, “the goal of the City Council is to throw the walls so that a prison does not look like and when any tourist does not know if it was a factory, a convent or what; A prison without walls is not a prison. ” And his protection is “precisely” for having been a penalty, “for having retaliated prisoners there.”
Precautionary measures
The restaurant award has also resorted. Last week, what will be the new restaurant-cafeteria of the Vieja prison was announced. The New Mediterranean cuisine has won the contest after being the only one to present an offer. As planned, for April of this year the prison will have been reconverted in a restaurant. “You cannot give that use, it is not compatible with the purpose of protection,” says Pacheco while adding that precautionary measures have been requested at the National Court both for the demolition of the walls and the rest of the project. “The protection of the Tapia of the Almudena cemetery has just been published because people were shot there, the same happened in the old prison.”
From the City Council they defend that “it is a project that guarantees the endurance, identification and signage of this property, contemplating the conservation of a complete wing of cells as a place of memory of what happened in it, for which it will be put in Value by expository and commemorative content ”. And they emphasize that the project “has been positively informed by the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Autonomous Community, in the same way that municipal technicians have confirmed their coherence with the protection regulations enjoyed by the building.”
Half a thousand shot
Moved by his father’s story, Rufino with his wife Juana Marín began to investigate the intramure history of the Old Prison in October 2015. For seven years the visits to the regional archive have been constant and the hours dedicated to the study, “incalculable ” They began by the files of the 543 convicted of death during Franco and the 23,000 files of the provincial prison, have come to review 16,778.
“My father spent three years in the old prison without trial, and despite the fact that he was preventive there, many people died, shot or hungry or disease.” With capacity for 300 people, up to 3,000 prisoners came to be done in their cells. José, the father of Rufino, was finally tried “for help to the rebellion” and transferred with a penalty of 20 years in prison minor to the Augustinian prison. “From there he went to the port of Santa María” and was amnestied by the saturation of Spanish prisons.
Like Sergio Pacheco, he considers that the Ministry’s resolution is late: “We should have done much earlier, we have had to insist a lot to the General Directorate of Democratic Memory to paralyze the works of the City Council.”
From Franco’s army, three places were chosen in Murcia to kill those who considered as enemies of the country: the National Film Field, which today houses a well -known shopping center; The Cemetery of Espinardo, where one of the first graves of Francoism in the transition was exhumed, and the walls of the old prison itself.
Many of the prison executions were arbitrary, such as those that took place on January 18, 1940, the day a journal of communist ideology appeared in the intramures of the penitentiary center: “That day the guards put the prisoners in line and killed By raffle to five of them: Valeriano Añaños, José San Nicolás, Fulgencio Jiménez, Jesús Caballero and Francisco Sol .
Among the pavilions, authentic butchers took place, such as the killings that occurred between April 3 and 9, 40, where 85 people were murdered in just six days. A horror that was paused on Sunday, for being considered the day of the Lord.
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