Mauseolum Crypt, Bilbao

This Mausoleum Crypt was built to house the remains of the people murdered during the attacks on the prisons of Bilbao in 1936 and 1937. 

Remembering the Civil War, and especially those who died in it, was central to the ideological foundation of the Franco regime. For Francoist authorities, 18 July was a key landmark of the “new Spain”. While some of the victims of the conflict were remembered, the memory of those on the Republican side was silenced and ignored. Those dead did not exist. 

This memory was created through the building of monuments, changing the names of streets, schools, hospitals and other public buildings, and adding to the calendar of holidays and commemorations. 

Francoist authorities undertook the creation of monuments to remember “those who gave their lives in the service of God and the Fatherland” even before the war had ended. In addition to monuments to celebrate their “Victory”, they filled the entire country with places of memory to honour those who “fell for God and Spain”. In the Basque Country, memorials to those who died in combat were overshadowed by memorials to the “martyrs”, the civilian victims of repression. 

The Francoist aerial bombings of Bilbao in 1936 and 1937 were followed by a number of attacks on the city’s prisons by armed people who murdered more than 300 right-wing prisoners, political leaders and members of the Basque social and economic elite among them. 

Fifteen days after the conquest of Bilbao by the rebel army, the new municipal government ordered the construction of this monument to honour “those who gave their lives in the service of God and Spain, the martyrs of the countless murders committed, to the sorrow of our people” where “the remains of everyone murdered during the period of red-separatist rule” would be interred. The Mausoleum was inaugurated on 25 September 1938 in the presence of the Minister of Industry and the municipal government declared that every year on that day and on 4 January, masses “for the salvation of the souls of the martyrs” would be said in their presence. 

Every year, for the rest of the dictatorship, the municipal government held a mass in the Mausoleum Crypt of the cemetery as well as a requiem in the cathedral in memory of the “martyrs”. Since the return of democracy, these masses have no longer been celebrated and the inscriptions in the Mausoleum have been removed, although the structure itself has been preserved. 

MU/ UB/ MJV