The War is Over: Alicante, 1939

This project was commissioned by the Generalitat Valenciana and the Valencian Federation of Municipalities and Provinces to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the civil war in Alicante. After spending a long time locating and examining all types of publications (the bibliography about the war is both elusive and unmanageable), we decided to focus our project on creating a book of memoirs. It is surprising to see how many people wrote or told their experiences in Alicante during those days in March and April of 1939. In this book we have gathered thirty testimonies from informants on the side of the defeated (that is, those who do not write history) who are direct witnesses of the events, either to report them, to keep them alive, or to forever expel them from their memory.

On 5 March the Republican colonel Casado announced his rebellion, while the Government of the Republic held its last Council of Ministers at El Poblet estate in Petrer; on 6 March President Juan Negrín and his collaborators went into exile from Fondó’s nearby aerodrome in Monóvar; on 28 March the last boats with refugees left the port of Alicante; on 29 and 30, thousands of people who were gathered at the port despaired because the boats that were meant to rescue them never came; on the same day, 30, the Italian army, allied to Franco, triumphantly entered the capital; on 1 April, the famous report announcing the end of the war (hence the title of the book) was broadcast from Burgos, and consecutively, the military and the Republican sympathisers were taken prisoners, held in public buildings and sent to concentration camps.

Eighty years later, these places are mostly ruins or empty lots where time and human activity have erased almost all traces. We bring them here as spaces to remember, in which to project manifestations of anguish, pain, and fear —and also of hope and the formidable desire to live— that arise from this dense and uncomfortable chronicle, probably as difficult to handle as the book itself.

The photographs were taken by José Maria Azkárraga on several trips to Alicante. It was not an excursion to the countryside, but something far more complicated to explain. The sky in some of the pictures must be similar to the one seen in 1939 by the first prisoners who arrived at the Albatera camp, as the time of year coincides.