Central Women’s Prison at Saturrarán

The Francoist regime carried out such a wide-ranging repression, imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people, that they had to use buildings that had not been constructed as prisons to hold them. The Santurrarán prison, shown in this aerial photograph from 1940, a former spa converted into a women’s prison, is an excellent example. That , across the country, the regime had to use schools, convnts, spas and even private houses as prisons testifies to the extent of the repression. 

Women were not spared the regime’s repression; in fact, they were subjected to special forms of punishment. They had their heads shaved, were made to drink castor oil and be paraded through the streets in a humiliating way. They were also subject to sexual abuse. The Saturrarán Central Women’s Prison functioned between 1938 and 1944 and was the most important prison for women in the north of Spain in those years. Over its life it housed almost 2,500 women arrested for political activities, many of them accompanied by young children.  

The conditions in Franco’s prisons were subhuman.  Most prisons housed many more prisoners than the number for which they had been designed. This overcrowding, combined with lack of hygiene and food shortages meant that male and female prisoners suffered malnutrition and any number of diseases. Tuberculosis, along with other diseases, was a fact of life. Many prisoners died. 

In most respects, men’s and women’s prisons were the same, but the inmates’ experience was quite different. To start with, the women were much more likely to be sexually abused. Many had children with them, three years old and younger, and having to care for their children in such horrid conditions constituted a double punishment, especially when their children died. Moreover, children had to leave prison when they turned three and if their mothers could not find someone such as a relative to take care of them, the state could hand them over to other families. Santurrarán was a dangerous place and female prisoners lost their children in different ways. 156 prisoners and 

APE / UB/ MJV