Places of the Hidden Memories of the Executioners

Only one of the buildings constructed in the Alameda of Santiago de Compostela for the Great Galician Regional Exhibition of 1909 remains standing: Antonio Palacios’ modernist structure that served as the Artistic and Industrial Recreation Pavilion.  It was designed as a leisure space, with a cafe, restaurant, and dance hall. Over time, it has been used for a number of different purposes, housing the municipal laboratory, the city’s first cinema, and, after 1936, the barracks of the local Falange.

The building that, since the 1970s, has been the Santa Susana kindergarten, was the headquarters of the political organization most closely identified with the coup, one that persecuted, detained, tortured, and murdered many citizens and representatives of the legitimate local powers. There have been a number of renovations, the most recent in 2018, which have sought to restore original elements of the building without disrupting its current use.  However, there is nothing that offers a democratic educational explanation of its ties to an uncomfortable past.

Significantly, the building stands only a few metres from the “Marías”, the most iconic, visited and photographed sculpture in the city. It represents the sisters Maruxa and Coralia Fandiño Ricart. Well known and popular in the 1950s and 1960s for their walks, which they always took at 2 pm on the dot, their colourful makeup and clothing were considered bizarre and provocative in a context in which anything that was beyond the “norm”. Those two seamstresses endured repeated persecution and violence at the hands of the rebels and Falangists. Their three brothers were anarcho-syndicalist leaders. One managed to escape by boat and go into exile. The other two were fugitives and then thrown into prison for many years. But nothing in the Alameda except fleeting memory and the writing of history connects the actions of the executioners with the sculptures of the two sisters.

LFP/CLS