Details of the map 'Madrid bombarded 1936 - 1939'
It is already known that History is written by the winners. That biases, silences, distorts and condemns to oblivion. And it is also known that whoever forgets, reoffends; that, as is often said, who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it.
In 2019, **80 years have passed since Franco's troops entered Madrid **, the city of Not pass! , from the verses of Gloria Fuertes about hunger, cold and falling shells; of the subway as an air-raid shelter; of the comings and goings to a front that could be seen from home; and of systematic aerial bombardment.
The neighborhood of Argüelles was one of the most affected
Because Madrid, despite the success of the Franco regime in hiding it behind an aura of glory and greatness, it became the first European city to suffer systematic and massive aerial bombardment. The destruction that this entailed is now reflected on the map Madrid bombed 1936 - 1939.
In it, you can see more than 1,600 references to buildings affected by the attacks who, during the Civil War, committed the Hitler's Condor Legion and Mussolini's Aviazione Legionaria , for whom the capital and other Spanish towns became the testing ground they needed to fine-tune the tactics they would later deploy in World War II.
“On the map we have located the buildings in Madrid that were affected by the bombings of the Civil War and that we have been able to document. It can be seen that the bombardments intensely affected many areas of what was the capital at the time and that, from November 1936 to March 1939, no inhabitant could be considered safe”.
Those who speak are their creators, Luis de Sobron and Enrique Bordes, Architect doctors and associate professors of the Department of Graphic Ideation of the ETS of Architecture of Madrid.
The plan, which they carried out on their own initiative and independently of the university, was born “years ago from an initial surprise: discover that the historical reality of Madrid as a bombed city is a fact that too many Madrilenians, and almost all its visitors, are unaware of”, they explain to Traveler.es.
'Madrid bombed 1936 - 1939'
Over time, the need arose to be able to visualize a large amount of scattered information, to understand the magnitude of the facts” . And it is that “Madrid already had a million inhabitants at that time and the map confirms that the bombings that the city suffered were systematic and massive,” they say.
To document them, Sobrón and Bordes have resorted to sources as diverse as firefighters, architects, photographers and part of the civilian population that suffered this siege. “Our documentary sources have been the books of interventions by firefighters, important photographic collections (National Library of Spain and Photographic Archive of the Propaganda Delegation of Madrid, located in the General Archive of the Administration) and the work of the architects who worked for the council during the war in the Committee for Reform, Reconstruction and Sanitation. Thanks to these documents we have been able to collect a lot of information that has allowed us to geolocate the affected buildings”.
His investigative work has been limited to what was the municipality of Madrid in 1936 , “but to locate the affected buildings we have taken as a base the map of current Madrid. We wanted to make a reading of our past from the present”, they explain.
Although the destruction was widespread, there are areas and neighborhoods such as Gran Vía, Puerta del Sol or Argüelles that they were particularly affected; and, although the morphology of the city was not altered, there “multitude of buildings after the war or certain urban voids cannot be understood without knowing the wounds left by this bombardment”.
The wounds left by the bombing can be seen today by following the map
“They are everywhere, in sight of any passer-by, but you have to know how to identify them. Once the map is made, it is easier to discover them throughout the city”.
This work, which comes as a kind of jolt to a collective conscience that did not experience the war or the post-war hardships, has been edited by the Madrid City Council and the distribution of the new print run will be channeled through the District Boards. They have just launched the website from where you can download the map and they are already thinking of new formats, such as a book, and already dreaming big, “hopefully an exhibition or some other musealized format”.
And it is that the reception has been more positive than its creators expected. “We have approached the work in the most scientific and technical way possible and we believe that this has been noticed, driving away pointless controversies. The vast majority of people want to know, remember and understand a story that is actually very recent. It is nothing more than being able to read the pages of our history that have not been written.”
Perhaps, in these accelerated times, of immediate opinions and absent reflection, we are beginning to be aware, as Sobrón and Bordes have learned, that “that memory is tremendously fragile and that the most terrible events can end up disappearing under a cloak of oblivion, as if they had never happened”.
The poet Luis Cernuda already wrote it in 1936: “Remember it yourself and remember it to others”.
Madrid lived three years under the bombs