After the civil war, Franco wanted to colonize empty Spain. So 300 new villages were invented

Throughout Spain there are more than 8,100 municipalitieslarge and small villages, coast, mountain, bathed by the waters of the Cantabrian, the Atlantic or of Mediterranean climate. There are also very old, such as Brañoserafounded in the ninth century, and others so recent that their first inhabitants can still tell us about their origins. This is the case of the 300 populations promoted by the Franco dictatorship as part of its colonization policy.

The peoples “Invented” By Franco.

A figure: 55,000. The idea is so crazy, so huge, that often It is said which motivated one of the population displacements most important of the Spain of the twentieth century. Between 1940 and 1970 The Franco regime founded around 300 locations in 27 provinces (half in Andalusia and Extremadura) that ended up causing the displacement of 55,000 familiespeople who a good day made their bags and left their native municipalities attracted by the promises of these new -wedge settlements.

“Peoples of Colonization”. The colossal project was developed under the auspices of the National Institute of Colonization (the Incan entity created After the civil war To carry out the Franco agricultural policy) and their promises were of course suggestive: families willing to move to the new settlements were offered homes and wide irrigation lands in which a future is carved. All this in property. At least in theory.

Input, the settlers had to meet certain requirements. The lots were supposedly distributed by raffle, although there are who holds That not all candidates started with the same possibilities: Ideally was that they were part of large families (with children willing to work) and adjusted to the archetype dreamed by Francoism: devout, laborious Catholics and to be possible Without links With reprisals. Nor did everyone start with the same conditions.

As remember ABCin 1945 the government approved an order that regulated how the colonists could access the houses, something that depended on their savings.

Under the tutelage of the INC. Who could advance part of the value of the land (20%) entered a phase that the INC called “access to property”. Then they had to pay the rest of the amount to become owners of their homes and farms. The thing changed for the humblest settlers. They had to spend five years in “Tutela period”, a stage during which the Institute supervised what they cultivated and remained a portion of the crops as payment.

How long did they spend like this? Depends. ABC appointment A town where that tutelage lasted until almost the end of the 60s, a time to which the families had to add the “access to property” stage. The newspaper also speaks of 25 -year deadlines to finish paying the lands (30 in the case of homes) with more than considerable interests, 3% or even 7%.

To complete the picture, the INC had a structure that was in charge of “guardianship” the families of settlers through intermediate charges. In the first place were the agronomists, authors of the plans. Its guidelines passed to the expert and below this was the Mayoral, who supervised the farmers.

And what was the goal? With the new settlement the Franco regime pursued several objectives. The program served to boost the Agrarian transformation (With irrigation extensions), expand the cultivable area, repopulate and transform the Spanish field, but also had an ideological background.

With the new settlements, many baptized with names that They mentioned to the new regime and its referents (Caudillo Alberche, Villafranco del Guadiana either Águeda del Caudillo), The dictatorship also sought to project a new image and feed its advertising. The expansion of the new villages coincided with The bet of the dictatorship by hydraulic infrastructure.

“The political strategy of the new State replaces the redistribution of the land (objective of the Second Republic) with a colonization policy based on the transformation of the rural that allowed to settle in villages of colonization a self -sufficient peasant”, Remember from the Ministry of Agriculture, on which the National Institute depended after its creation, in October 1939.

A program with lights … The colonization policy of Francoism had social, economic, agricultural and even “undeniable” repercussions, such as They recognize From the ministry. And not only because the creation of hundreds of villages for Repopulation of the ’emptied Spain’ and postwar. Among the displaced there were those who, upon their arrival at the settlements, found infrastructures and unimaginable services in the villas from which they came.

“When we got here it was like dreaming awake,” He recounts The country A retired farmer who arrived in Villalba in Calatrava (Ciudad Real) with his parents in 1964, when he was 12 years old. “There was a bathroom, with its cup and sink. In those years that had no one! He was very small, but having something like that was out of series.” The idea was that in the new settlements the settlers could opt for a house in fertile property and lands, contributing in passing to the economy of postwar Spain and the conversion of fields into irrigation.

… And also with shadows. Not everything was positive. Despite the promises of housing and lands, many settlers to reach the property cost them years of sweat delivering part of their crops. “We were slaves,” confesses a The country Another old settler of The Bazanawhere he arrived with just 17 or 18 years. In 2018, already after 85, he remembered: “They paid you what they wanted for the crops, and then there came a point where they stopped buying them because the beans from Badajoz were very expensive.” The cultivation of the new lands was not always simple, just as it was not to follow the guidelines marked by the engineers and major people of the town.

Others left their lifelong locations to move to new wedge settlements in which they had no roots, they were surrounded by strangers and (sometimes) they met half -finished works. “When they granted me the plot, there were no free houses and we had to live in the blocks of the corral of a neighbor the animals,” Explain Another old settler of Talavera la Nueva (Toledo) to the newspaper ABC. “We arrived without a road, or doctor, no school or drinking water. It was the conquest of the bass Guadalquivir, just like the American conquest.”

“A bicoca for landowners”. At the origin of the new settlements of Franco there are however many more nuances and derivatives, as the historian Antonio Cazorla, author of ‘The peoples of Franco’ recalled last October, in An interview With the digital CTXT. Many of the villages were created in expropriated lands to large Extremadura or Andalusian landowners, which, against what might seem, gave them a real business opportunity.

“In reality, only less than 30%of the total land was expropriated. The rest, which used to be the best quality and more conveniently located, was the landowner, but irrigated with money from the State, so that the value of the earth increased at least 400%, and sometimes more than 1,000%,” Apostille. “The result is simple. Without investing a hard, and without any risk, the landowner increased its assets between 280 and 700%. And there were other ways to benefit. Meanwhile, the settlers had to pay everything at an interest of 5% annual average.”

“His greatest success was local”. Cazorla points out that “the great failure” of colonization was that “the misery of the vast majority of poor Spanish peasant,” and Slide an explanation: “He did not do it because it was an instrument, one more than a broader policy of the dictatorship to avoid a social change in the field based on the redistribution of wealth.” In his opinion, his “greatest success” was local, as on the Almeria coast, where he contributed to boost intensive agriculture through wisinals and the use of greenhouses.

The unexpected revolution. Although the new locations were born linked to Franco and a few years ago They were news again Because the Democratic Memory Law forced some to modify their names to eliminate references to the regime in its topography, the 300 peoples sponsored by the INC have become referents of modernity in another area: the artistic.

Against any forecast (or not) many now look at architectural and urban treasures. The reason? For its development the regime signed rookie architects who ended up consecrating in the trade, as José L. Fernández del Amo, Fernando de Terán either Antonio Fernández Alba.

Conservatives and avant -garde (depends). “It exists among the unanimity scientific community in the relevance of the architectural work of colonization policy, expressed mainly through the construction of the new peoples of colonization,” grants The Ministry. The key was given a year ago at eldiario.es laureano debat, co -author of ‘colonization. Stories of peoples without history ‘. “The peoples of colonization were Francoist, Catholics and carcas in the ideological. But avant -garde in the aesthetic.”

Images | Castilla-La Mancha Board, Wikipedia

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