Wanting to avoid fires in Oviedo, the cleaners have encountered another problem: the Civil War
If we believed that Spain had already cataloged every last vestige of the Civil War, bad news. Artillery corners still pop up like mushrooms in autumn. Scars of a territory that reminds us of a broken country. Imagine the look on the faces of the city hall’s cleaning professionals when they put the brushcutter where it didn’t belong. Imagine the face of the municipal crew of Oviedo: cleaning any path in the municipality of El Campón in the middle of July, the machine trips over reinforced concrete and an embrasure from 1937, hidden under the ferns for 89 years. Anyone who knows Mount Naranco is not surprised. Those who only follow guided routes, tourist plates and school manuals, will be amazed. A front under the bushes. The archives say that Oviedo endured a republican siege in 1936 which ended up breaking towards October. So, Naranco was filled with trenches to watch the steps towards Grado. In El Rebollal they counted thirteen positions: two for machine gun, eleven for rifle. Campo Cimero has thirty-one, distributed in four arches towards the northwest, the largest defensive complex in Asturias. To cite an example, in Ayones the nest preserves its original geometry: seven sides on the outside, cylinder on the inside, built in 1937 by the Republicans. And of course, the undergrowth does not erase these structures, rather it preserves and contours them. And except for the nationalist constructions of Pando, almost everything preserved in this area—Rebollal, Campo Cimero, Fitoria, Ayones—is republican. Spain’s wounds. Although no one has the exact figure, the BunkerAtlas portal has registered and geolocated 192 positions. It is more of a sample than an official census, of course. Madrid concentrates almost 19% of what is catalogued; Catalonia is around 16%; Navarra 12%; Aragon 11%. And almost six out of every ten registered structures were built during the Civil War, by both sides. Only in Madrid have they documented more than 2,000 fortifications in a hundred municipalities, about 500 concrete; The capital already has 531 inventory tokens between Casa de Campo, El Pardo and Ciudad Universitaria. In the Pyrenees, the Franco regime designed Line P: ten thousand bunkers planned along 500 kilometers of border. Luckily the work stopped with less than half built, about 4,000, and became obsolete around 1980. Multiply that by each front—Ebro, Jarama, the Oviedo fence itself—and the real figure is surely around tens of thousands. Most remain under brambles, awaiting clearing. Who decides what is saved. Spain catalogs this heritage since the Historical Memory Law of 2007, expanded by the Democratic Memory Law 2022—revised March 2026—. Both require identifying and protecting these remains, and in some cases opening them to the public. The problem, as always, is one of resources: inventorying thousands of kilometers of trench costs money that does not always arrive, and each recovered nest depends on a city council, a memory association or a forestry crew that stumbles upon it. Present over past, as always. Let’s think about The Carmen of the Martyrsthe most beautiful garden around the Alhambra, which stands above the old Corral de los Cautivos, where Christian prisoners spent the night in Arab dungeons. After the Civil War it served as a residence for young people. In 1970, a hotel project razed a good part of the historic forest, until neighborhood protests stopped the work. Or the Turó de la Rovira. Everyone knows it as the Carmel Bunkers, although the name is a historical error: there was never a bunker or underground shelter there. What the Republic installed in 1938 was an open-air anti-aircraft battery, four 105 mm Vickers cannons, to stop the bombing by Italian aviation over Barcelona. When the war ended, the Republican army disabled the pieces and withdrew, leaving the concrete empty. Today is the most photographed sunset in Barcelona, a nest of tiktokers. The other urgency: summer rules. The reality is that the vestige found in El Campón responds to a key action and none of this should stop the clearing. On the contrary. The summer of 2026 is already the worst start in the historical series: June closed with 90% more burned area than the average of the last twenty years, and quadrupled the data for the same month in 2025. The Almería fire devastated nearly 6,600 hectares, with projections that are close to 7,000. The European Union launched its largest historical firefighting deployment and it is not easy to suspect that it is still insufficient. Perimeter clearing responds to the law. Although the hoax that environmental regulations prohibit cleaning the mountain circulates every July; Neither the 2030 Agenda, nor the European Green Deal, nor the Forestry Law prohibit clearing. They demand it, with an annual plan. Memory and prevention do not compete. All you have to do is notify Heritage, let the nest breathe for a while in the sun and then decide what to do with it. The Civil War remains buried in half of Spain; chainsaw is just what is needed to clear brush and clean up against the spread of fires. Image | Flickr (Diego Valera) In Xataka | In 1938 Spain was divided in two. So two “Gordos” were delivered from the Christmas Lottery
