Memorial to Valencian victims of “Francoism and of hatred and intolerance

This memorial to Valencian victims of ‘Francoism and of hatred and intolerance’ was inaugurated by the Valencian city council on 14 April 2021, the 90th anniversary of the declaration of the Second Republic. It commemorates victims buried in a mass grave in the city’s General Cemetery in the immediate post-war years. However, it also stands symbolically in dialogue with a controversial monument in construction at Madrid’s Almudena Cemetery. The Valencian memorial includes these lines from poet Miguel Hernández, “Porque soy como el árbol talado, que retoño: porque aún tengo la vida” [Because I am like the felled tree that sprouts again: because I am still alive]. These same words were also to have been displayed on a monument at the Almudena Cemetery designed by sculptor Fernando Sánchez Castillo. It had been planned by the administration of mayor Manuela Carmena to honour 2937 victims illegally killed and buried in the cemetery in the years 1939 to 1944. In 2019 mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida ordered that the half-finished memorial be redesigned, and the inscription of victims’ names removed because the monument did not comply with the city administration’s own Historical Memory Commission’s policy of impartiality in relation to memory. Several hundred of the victims were accused of being ‘chequistas’ involved in the massacre of Nationalist prisoners at Paracuellos de Jarama, the worst Republican atrocity of the Civil War. Hernández’s lines have thus become the hinge in a series of cultural memory wars fought through heritage sites and tangible memorials within Spain.