Salobreña Town Hall said that it had started work this week on the first phase of a campaign to locate and exhume the victims of the Spanish Civil War in unmarked graves within the municipal cemetery.

The Town Council is able to begin this work thanks to authorisation from the Junta de Andalucia, published in the Official Regional Gazette (BOJA), on the 2nd of this month.

The excavation work started on Monday and will continue until Friday the 16th of October thanks to a budget 30,000 euros, funded by the VI Plan de Recuperación de Memoria Democrática 2025-2026 with the support of the Federación Española de Municipios y Provincias (FEMP) alongside the Ministerio de Política Territorial y Memoria Democrática.

As the area actually being excavated is beneath the central aisle, the main entrance will be closed, but people can still access the cemetery through side entrances.

The area chosen was because of what people remember from the times or what their parents passed on to them, therefore, this is a preliminary, phase-based archaeological verification to confirm official records (Guardia Civil ones) and information of what families of the victim supplied. Obviously, no definitive conclusions will be drawn until field results are evaluated.

Editorial Comment: It is sad testimony to the depth of the scars left by this conflict and the lingering post-Franco reluctance of the Spanish right, that we had to wait until all the executioners are dead and buried before we could recover the bodies of their victims.

(News: Salobrena, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)

Keywords: Spanish Civil War, Unmarked Graves, Victims, Excavation, Exhumation, DNA Identification, Municipal Cemetery

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