Movement of the Front Lines and Refugee Flows

The rebels’ repeated military successes produced massive flows of refugees, eventually reaching a total of 3 million people, seeking safety in the parts of Spain that remained under Republican control. Some of them would flee more than once. This map illustrates this process of rebel advances - the blue lines - and the subsequent movement of refugees – the red lines.

The first major episode was the flight of people from the Army of Africa as it advanced northwards through Andalucia and Extremadura during the summer and autumn of 1936 and then turned towards Madrid. Almost 500,000 peasants, terrorized by the news and rumours of the atrocities committed by the rebel troops fled to the capital. When the city came under siege and repeated aerial assaults started in November 1936, the Republican authorities evacuated them, along children, their mothers and the old and ill, to safer and better supplied places on the Mediterranean coast.

This was the second great refugee flow. The third was the flight of tens of thousands of people from Malaga and the coastal region of Granada to Almería, following the rebels’ conquest of Malaga in February 1937. During the “Desbandá” as it was called, the refugees found themselves under repeated attack by rebel planes and naval vessels. Once they reached Almería, most were sent by Republican authorities to provinces further along the Mediterranean.

The fourth flow of refugees came in the summer of 1937, when the Republican

zone in the north collapsed in the face of the rebel offensive. This was a primarily a movement within the regions of the Basque Country, Asturias, and Santander. Although thousands managed to escape to France by sea, most quickly came under Francoist control.

The final flow of refugees began at the end of 1938 and ended in February 1939 when Aragon and Catalonia fell to the Francoists. By then, Catalonia, a region of 3 million people, had received some 900,000 refugees from the rest of the country. 

The Francoist conquest of Catalonia would lead to one more mass flight, but this time there was no safe place within the country for refugees to go. Some 450,000 Spaniards would cross the border with France and become exiles, although 300,000 of them would return to Spain during that year.