Argelès Camp Memorial

It’s early 1939… the advance of the Francoist forces corral hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as a large part of the Republican army in northeastern Spain and along the Mediterranean coast. Following the fall of Barcelona and the collapse of the Catalonia front, close to a half a million people, fleeing from the bombings, repression by Francoistvtroops, and political persecution, cross the Pyrenees in a few days. This exodus is known as the Retirada. The refugees hoped that France would be a land of asylum. What they found there was detention, cold, hunger… and the great desolation of what for many would become “the endless pain of exile”. 

The first of what the government of the day called “concentration camps” was quickly thrown up in the coastal town of Argelès-sur-Mer. The first and the largest camp, it would receive some 120,000 Spanish refugees. On the beach itself, women, men and children hemmed in by barbed wire would endure horrific conditions under the vigilance of French military and police. Nazi occupation authorities would close the camp down at the end of 1942.

For many years, there was an emptiness on the beach as vast as the silence that covered this history and this memory. Not just in Argelès-sur-Mer, but in all of France and in Spain as well, until the municipal government decided to lift the veil of silence over this hidden memory.  

In this way, a task of recovering the memory of the camp of Argelès-surfer and its connection to the Spanish Republican refugees and their internment there began. A pioneer in this memory work, it was a matter of the municipality confronting this historical reality and transmitting it. In 1999, a “memory route” along the places of ‘memory”: the monolith on the beach, the Spaniards’ Cemetery, the North Square, was created . The work culminated in 2014 with the creation of the Memorial of the Camp of Argelès which now receives 15,000 visitors per year. Every year since, there have been a number of events, commemorations, debates, at least two temporary exhibits, Memory Marches, programs for schools and students. In collaboration with the FFREEE (Sons and Daughters of Spanish Republicans and Chikdren of the Exile), we have also established ourselves as a repository for memory resources.  

We are committed to broadening this Labour of recovery and transmission, the commitment to Memory that began in Argelès-sur-Mer. This will include supporting all the initiatives inspired by the Law of Democratic Memory, as we assume our part in what we consider a necessary duty towards those who fought for Democracy and we victims of Francois barbarism. 

Website: 

https://www.memorial-argeles.eu/fr/