The Generalitat has taken one more step in the establishment of an Interpretation Centre at the Albatera concentration camp with the promise of 100,000 euros in order to purchase a plot which will house the museum.
This follows the latest discovery of the foundations of one of the barrack blocks, 60 metres long by 7 metres wide, where it is hoped that the former building will be reconstructed.
“You can see the structure perfectly,” says historian and archaeologist Felipe Mejías, who also found in the Documentary Centre of Historical Memory in Salamanca, the plans and a selection of photos showing the Republican Labour Camp when it was in operation.
This was prior to it being taken over by the Franco regime, between April and November 1939, where thousands of Republican prisoners were locked up in subhuman conditions, including those who could not get on the SS Stanbrook, the last exile ship that left the port of Alicante at the end of the civil war.
The Regional Minister for Participation, Rosa Pérez Garijo, met with Manuel Gil, mayor of San Isidro municipality where the site is located, to start the process that will enable the acquisition of the land to turn it into a memory interpretation centre.
Garijo said that “the intention of the Generalitat is to acquire the plot” to create a museum that “serves for reflection so that we do not forget one of the saddest and most regrettable episodes of our recent past.”
The project will have a budget of 100,000 euros, after becoming one of the winning proposals of the first participatory budgets of the Generalitat for 2022.
He added that “everything we find in the field should serve to broaden the knowledge of this page of our history and help citizens discover the historical, patrimonial and memorial importance of this site.”
The working group, which has carried out two searches in an area covering 14 hectares (one last year and another between August and October), has used a machine to probe the ground in order to find common graves, work that will continue in the 2022 campaign with a budget allocation of 11,200 euros. “Everything indicates that we are close,” says Mejías.
