Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
Panteón de la Memoria, Cementerio de San Rafael, Málaga
Repression & memory site
The story
After Málaga fell in February 1937, military courts and summary shootings killed thousands of Republican supporters, many against the wall of the old San Rafael cemetery. Their bodies were thrown into mass graves there. Between 2006 and 2009 archaeologists exhumed 2,840 bodies — one of the largest Civil War grave excavations in Spain. The cemetery has since been turned into a park and the remains placed in a memorial pantheon, inaugurated on 11 January 2014. Málaga had also seen heavy repression in the Republican zone in the first months of the war, before the city fell; the two waves of killing should be understood together.
What you can see today
A park on the site of the former cemetery with the Panteón de la Memoria, a monument holding the recovered remains, and walls of victims' names.
Plan your visit
Camino de San Rafael, in the Carretera de Cádiz district west of the centre; open during park hours, free.
Sources
- ladesbanda.es/puntos-de-memoria/
- ladesbanda.es/puntos-de-memoria/
- juntadeandalucia.es/organismos/culturaydeporte/areas/cultura/memoria-democratica/lugares-memoria-democratica/paginas/carretera-malaga-almeria.html
Nearby sites
- Paseo de los Canadienses / Peñón del Cuervo — 'La Desbandá' memorial, Málaga · 11 km
- Parque de la Memoria 'Málaga 1937', Torre del Mar · 32 km
- Puente Viejo de Maro (Desbandá crossing), Nerja · 54 km
- Fuerte de Carchuna and the Motril front, Granada coast · 91 km
- Huerta de San Vicente (García Lorca house-museum), Granada · 91 km
- Parque Federico García Lorca, Alfacar (Fuente Grande) · 100 km
All 158 sites in Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 →
The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
A free field guide for your phone: the route, the maps and the stories built in, even with no signal. The battlefields, trenches, ruined villages, shelters, museums and memorials of the Spanish Civil War across the whole of Spain, told fairly from both sides.
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