Monument to the Victims of the Campo de Rata

The Campo de Rata is located in A Coruña, which in 1936 was the capital of the 8th Military Division and the location of the principal sites of administrative, civil, and judicial power in the province. After the coup of 20 July, that waterfront site became a killing field where the rebels executed and “gave rides To” hundreds of people. Often those barbaric acts were turned into macabre public spectacles.

At the end of the 1990s, the municipal government, in collaboration with the Republican Atheneum of Galicia and the Atoche-Monte Alto Residents’ Association, developed a project to construct a monument to the people who had been murdered there. It was to be located on the site of the former military building against whose walls people taken to the firing squads were lined up. The monument was designed by Isaac Díaz Pardo, the founder of the famous Sargadelos ceramic company, and son of the artist Camilo Díaz Baliño, who had been “taken for a ride” in the middle of August 1936. On the lintels are two poems, one by Federico García Lorca and the other by Uxío Carre Alvarellos, along with a photograph which took place on executions of 20 October 1936 that the painter and photographer Benito Prieto Coussent took clandestinely.

At the inauguration in April 2001, the 70th anniversary of the Second Republic, the artist explained the meaning of his creation: “Sixty-five years ago when, with the humility of a Franciscan and without meaning to remember in order to upset people, to remember that in these fields, on leaving the quarry pocked with holes, they built with rocks, a kind of fallen megalithic stone monument (which can represent the remains of our demolished ideals that we had to remember) in those fields next to the Tower of Hercules , they killed many people whose only crime was not to think the same way as their killers.” (La Voz de Galicia, 9 de abril de 2001)

LFP/CLS