The Memory park and carnaval of Sartaguda

In 2008, the Memory Park, the main memory monument in Navarre to the victims of the coup of July 1936, was inaugurated in Sartaguda. The result of an initiative by two associations: the Widows’ Village of Sartaguda and Families of the Executed of Navarre, the park contains a number of statues and a wall with the names of the approximately 3,000 people murdered in Navarre during the Civil War. Reconstruction, a group sculpture by Rodrigo Romero Pérez that represents the broken families and the suffering of the widows and their children, was added in 2016. It consists of the figures of a woman and a girl, both holding their heads high, and behind them the fragmented silhouette of a male body. It is not a coincidence that this Memory Park is in Sartaguda, which is known as the Village of the Widows, and even less that it has a sculpture that recovers the memory of the pain and daily resistance of many women. 

This Navarrese village of 1,200 people was, in per capita terms, the most heavily hit be the repression and political cleansing carried out by the rebel side. Eighty-four men, most of them young agricultural labourers and members of left-wing unions, were murdered. Those men had carried on the demands that had been made for decades and which had brought them up against the Duke of Infantado and, in the prelude to the war, his administrator, Ramón Torrrijos, who is considered to have been responsible for the massacre. The murderers left more than 60 young widows and numerous orphans. As was the case in the reprisals against the “reds” across the peninsula, they suffered not only the seizure of their property, hunger and other material hardships, but also such public humiliations as being made to work without pay cleaning the village or harvesting crops, ingesting cod liver oil, having their heads shaved, arrests, and even rape. 

Despite the punishments, the fact that their loved ones remained in mass graves and that they had to wait until the death of the dictator, Francisco Franco to exhume them and bury them in dignified way in 1979, the widows and their children fought so that the name of their loved ones would not be forgotten. The Sartaguda Memory Park thus honours both the men who were executed and, in a very special way, their wives. 

The recognition of their memory has also taken a very different cultural form: a carnival. Since 2018, Sartaguda’s rural carnival has included a new component in which local women dressed up as widows carry the effigy of Torrijos, the Duke’s horrific administrator, through the streets, read his sentence, and burn him in a bonfire. The “widows” then dance around the fire, driving home their role as protagonists.