Franco Archives - usatoday24

The oldest reservoir in Europe is in Alicante. It is 400 years before Franco

July 20, 2026 by usatoday24

It starts raining and someone says: “We’ll need all this water for later.” Spain’s relationship with dams, reservoirs and swamps seems complicated, as if catching every drop of torrential rain were a simple requirement. The reality is that in our country there are 374 reservoirs with 56,000 cubic hectometers (hm³) of capacity. This involves trapping approximately 50% of the country’s river flow. Because Spain has always been a land of reservoirs. Before its official name existed, before the Enlightenment, before Velázquez was even born, there was already a 46-meter dam containing water in a town in Alicante. It still stands and, in fact, still works. And he continues watering gardens every summer. Commissioned by a king, not a dictator. The Tibi Reservoir rises above the Monnegre Riverbetween the municipalities of Tibi and Jijona. Philip II commissioned its construction in 1580 to the Italian engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli, following a proposal from two residents of Muchamiel, Miguel Alcaraz and Pere Izquierdo, who knew well the behavior of the river. After the first push, the works were stopped due to lack of money with only six meters of wall raised. They were resumed nine years later and finished in 1594. The result: a gravity dam with a curved plan, 46 meters high and 65 meters high, the highest in Europe at its time, a record that was not surpassed until the Enlightenment. Its arch design, with a radius of 107 meters, anticipated the technique of modern arch dams, those that transfer the force of water to their abutments and foundations. Broken, repaired, and still in use. The reservoir suffered a major break in 1697 and several generations were left unable to use it. In 1601, a flood opened a crack and left the reservoir dry. They repaired it, but badly. And the years continued to pass. Until 1697, where a serious breakage left several generations unable to use its water. In fact, the dam remained unavailable for 40 years. In those days a legend was born that well deserves its folk horror film: the Quarantamaula, a bug that was half cat, half rooster, half wolf, which hid among the reeds. No one knew where the cracks originated and they spoke of sabotage. Maybe it was the slope of the terrain, maybe it was an attack or something intentional using a drum of gunpowder. Or they simply used too cheap materials. In 1736 the repair began and lasted two years. And until today. The sediments accumulated over centuries reduced its original capacity, from between 4 and 5.4 million cubic meters, to the current 2 cubic hectometers. Even so, The Alicante Orchard Irrigation Union continues to manage it for the same purpose for which it was built: to water the Alicante orchard. In 1994, coinciding with the fourth centenary of its completion, the Generalitat Valenciana declared it an Asset of Cultural Interest. Why is it still standing?. The secret is not only in the stone, it is in the surrounding rock. The technicians chose a gorge barely nine meters wide between two almost vertical limestone walls, Mos del Bou and La Cresta, and laid out the wall in a curve, with a radius of 107 meters, so that the thrust of the water was transmitted laterally towards that rock instead of falling only on the dam. In practice they built less of a wall and more of an artificial extension of the mountain: from floor to ceiling, this was carved ashlar on the outside, filled masonry on the inside. That curved idea, so counterintuitive in 1580, did not come from any Crown engineer: it was proposed by Pere Esquerdo, a miller from Mutxamel whom local chronicles call “the first inventor of the swamp.” The royal technicians, the Antonellis, Jorge Palearo—and Juan de Herrera, the same architect of El Escorial, for the final revision of 1594— limited themselves to perfecting the idea of a neighbor without a title. The result lasted two centuries as the highest dam in the world. In 1941, already in the midst of Franco’s regime, a new drainage tunnel was added. That is all that the regime touched on Tibi, when it had already been operating for almost 350 years. The wall that is seen today is still, in essence, that of 1594. There are even older dams. In fact, Tibi shares the podium with the Almansa reservoir, in Albacete, completed in 1584 and considered the first modern construction of this type in Europe. Between the two, Tibi is the one that has been operating the longest without interruption and the one that removed the most stone (more than 40,000 cubic meters). And neither of them is the oldest in the country: The official inventory of large dams starts with Cornalvo and Proserpinanear Mérida, built by the Romans in the first century. And any historian knows that already built in wet. On the Arroyo de la Albuhera (a tributary of the Aljucén and, in turn, the Guadiana), Mérida, the Roman capital of Lusitania, had this earth and concrete dam covered with older granite ashlars. More than one hundred of the large dams that still exist in Spain today already existed in 1915, two decades before the Civil War. The joke doesn’t fit the story.. The recurring joke that, when faced with any swamp, one says “Franco did it” is a pantomime. The regime itself fed that idea on purpose with the NO-DO, showing the dictator cutting ribbons and opening floodgates. And it is true that many reservoirs were built between 1939 and 1975: the WWF calculates 581 large dams alone between 1950 and 1980, with the labor of political prisoners in conditions of forced labor. But Spanish hydraulic policy was not invented by Francoism. It was born in 1902 with the Gasset Plan, and was institutionalized in 1926, under Primo de Rivera, with the creation of the Hydrographic Confederations. His Avengers version, the most ambitious, the National Plan for Hydraulic Works of 1933, was a project of the Second Republic, … Read more

This is the sad story behind La Atalaya de Ciudad Real, the most perverted Franco sanatorium

July 13, 2026 by usatoday24

Any Carles Porta fans in the room? If you have seen ‘Crims’ or some of his other documentary series, you already know the enormous impact that Catalan true crime has. But Ciudad Real has his own black chronicle. And it is perhaps one of the darkest and most unknown stories of our country. And, therefore, more interesting to unravel. If every city has its cursed hill, on the outskirts of Ciudad Real La Atalaya stands out, with privileged views and a legend that has been feeding itself for decades. We have it all: lady in white, psychophonies and there is something much more prosaic and sadder, which is nothing other than a building that never served its purpose and houses a tragedy that mythology ended up devouring. With tuberculosis tea, not terror. In 1943, the Ciudad Real city council bought those lands. At the request of the Patronage of Tuberculosis Patients, La Atalaya was part of a Franco plan of thirty-five anti-tuberculosis sanatoriums spread throughout Spain. The hill met the condition required by the national competition: sufficient isolation to avoid contagion, but not so much as to make access difficult. In 1954, work began and in February 1955, the first floor was ready, with capacity for three hundred beds. The problem is that medicine moved faster than brick: by the time the building could be opened, antibiotics had already drastically reduced cases of tuberculosis in Spain. Before housing a single patient, the sanatorium was born obsolete. Without job or benefit. Good location and good brick, but it was time to reform. In 1961, ownership of the building passed to the National Psychiatric Trust. The works are even slower and are not completed until 1970. A year later, in 1971, the building finally opens its doors as a regional center for people with mental disabilities. Or that’s how it was defined. And it operated like this for twenty-five years, until its final closure in 1996. From then on it was abandoned. Cobwebs, thefts, noises and a black legend that is gaining strength: rumors of mistreatment of inmates, screams of torture that can still be heard and a three-meter figure walking through the empty hallways. I would like Slender Man or the monster from ‘Backrooms‘ have so much presence. The real tragedy occurred. Easter 1987, early morning of April 20. It’s not a song. That morning, a 33-year-old police officer, Isidro Mejías, unloads his service weapon at a Citroën Visa where a young couple, María del Mar Perales Serrano and Alfredo Lozano Galán, ages 19 and 21, are. He then got into the victims’ own car and shot himself in the temple. What just happened? The Lanza newspaper titled the April 22 cover: “A police officer, alleged perpetrator of the death of two young people in La Atalaya.” The door locks were locked, suggesting the couple saw danger coming and tried to protect themselves by locking themselves inside. According to those close to the agent, married and father of two children, he led a normal life and had no known serious problems; The victims’ family did not know him at all either. Without a motive, the urban legend was later filled with crimes of passion, sects and curses. Today a plaque at the site remembers the young people who died. The lady in the white nightgown. The thing doesn’t end here. Because the ghostly woman, dressed in whitewhose figure proverbially appears on the curve leading to the old sanatorium, has been seen by motorcyclists and drivers for decades. several people interviewed for Misterios Conquenses They assure the same. It is not uncommon to find someone who has seen someone and confirms that yes, this folklore motif is repeated here more than anywhere else. The photos of silhouettes difficult to explain taken by Carlos Torrijos, the lights in the sky recorded by witnesses and collected by TVE in 2004… until Iker Jiménez echoed and turned La Atalaya into the territory of reference of the La Mancha mystery. Where does it come from? The theory says that she was a patient at the children’s psychiatric hospital who jumped out of a window, or that she was a girl kidnapped and murdered on the spot—there is no police record of this kidnapping. It even links to a previous appearance from 1939, weeks before the end of the Civil War, when several witnesses claimed to see a woman in white on successive nights who radiated her own light. Demolition and end of the curse. In 2007, the building was officially condemned; unofficially, to “end evil.” The abandonment left structures in dangerous conditions. But even that didn’t quite work: months after the demolition, the burned body of the doorman of a nearby nightclub was found near the scene. And the legend immediately incorporated it into its story. The pain comes from behind, as always. In the Manchego Studies Notebooks (#49) the prolonged inquisitorial persecution of witchcraft and witchcraft in the current province of Ciudad Real is documented, where cases of torture such as that of María de Lao are identified. Today the hill is a municipal forest park, with hiking trails, a children’s area and picnic areas. The Ciudad Real resident who goes out to play sports and the one who goes up at night looking for the lady’s curve coexist there, without much conflict. Your own video game. Local studio Sonrisilla Games—formed by designer Marta Ruiz (‘Waxipola’) and developer Samuel Sanjuan (‘SamKnight’)—is finishing ‘Stories from the Watchtower – The Witcher‘, a graphic horror adventure set on the hill. The project was born after the developers event Guadalindiein Malaga. And, apparently, it has required a lot of journalistic work from its creators: collection of oral testimonies, comparison of real events and interviews with those who experienced the history of the sanatorium up close. The game will be released in months and will mix the black chronicle of 1987, the myth of the witch of The Watchtower and the popular witchcraft documented in the area. Behind it … Read more

In 1965 the Franco regime wanted to build a huge reservoir in Extremadura: instead it had 50 deaths and a cover-up

October 9, 2025 by usatoday24

On October 22, 1965, a disastrous whistle began with a dismal sound in the working-class town of Saltos de Torrejón el Rubio, province of Cáceres, that at least some of the employees who at that time were working on the construction of the dams on the Tajo and Tiétar rivers have been fearing for days. About the nine twenty in the morning, while the children were hurrying through their breakfasts to leave for school, the hum of a siren began to resonate. The warning siren. The same one that screamed to warn of accidents. The problem is that that autumn morning Accident could very well have been written like that, with a capital letter. The discreet, humble and remote working-class town of the municipality of Torrejón el Rubioin the heart of Monfragüe, has just served as the setting that many still consider today as the worst work accident occurred in the history of Spain. A monumental work That is what the Franco dictatorship intended in the mid-1960s with the works in the channels of the Tiétar and Tagus rivers, to carry out an enormous reference work in Europe. It was the stage of developmentalism and only a few years earlier, in 1959, the regime had had to deal with the Ribadelago catastrophecaused by the failure of a dam that took away 144 residents of the Zamoran town. In Extremadura he wanted to make amends. In Xataka After the Civil War, Franco wanted to colonize emptied Spain. So 300 new towns were invented The project developed in Cáceres was certainly important. Neither more nor less than building two dams between the channels of the Tagus and Tiétar rivers, along with a huge canal between both infrastructures to transfer water and generate electricity. By October 1965 the works were already more than advanced. It is estimated that about 4,000 workers between 1959 and 1966, many of them residents of surrounding towns who found in the project a way to avoid emigration. In 2020, the anthropologist Manuel Trinidad he explained to elDiario.es that works of this type came to form a kind of guild, “the pantaneros”, who moved from one side of Extremadura to the other. The Negratín reservoir, in Granada. (Unsplash) To accommodate the workers who shaped the infrastructure for seven years, two towns were built, “the one upstairs”, designed for company officials and managers; and another for the laborers. Proof that it was an authentic town is that they had services such as a school, commissary, dining room, chapel, church and even a tavern, tobacco shop and a Civil Guard barracks. The Extremadura Newspaper precise that the person in charge of the construction was Agromán and the work was carried out for Hidroeléctrica Española, today Iberdrola. What happened? A combination of factors. One in which the meteorology is combined and everything indicates that negligence of those responsible for the project. The previous weeks had been especially rainy, which little by little caused the water level of the swamp to rise until it was barely 83 centimeters of the maximum authorized level. That the level and pressure rose did not mean, however, that the workers stopped working on the canal and the river bed. The inhabitants of the town were in fact preparing to witness quite a spectacle, like I would recognize years later one of the victims The Country: “Seeing the waterfalls of foaming water from the spillways for the first time.” It wasn’t like that. And what was expected to be a spectacle ended up being revealed as a branch. The pressure of the dammed liquid was such that a cofferdam ended up bursting. 14 tons that protected the pumping tunnel. Result: a violent torrent of water that ended up flooding the conduit, the underground plant and galleries. With everything that this implies. And the workers? That is one of the keys to the tragedy. In the flooded canal between the Tagus and Tiétar dams, crews of workers continued to work and could do little to avoid the violence of the water. Not only that. The torrent expanded with such force that it ended up taking with it other employees who were toiling in the dry river bed. It is estimated that at that point alone there were some 400 people when the tragedy occurred. The force and speed of the water made it difficult for even them to get to safety. The event was so dramatic that it forced the town to be evacuated and rescue efforts to begin. “My father and many other workers were seeing him coming. He dreamed at night. He repeated many times: something is going to happen and it is going to be very bad. They want to try working with us,” remembers Flori Almendral in statements collected by The Jump. She is not the only one who retains memories of that episode. Paqui Martos tells for the same report how they managed to throw a rope to save a young man who was floating in a well. “It held on tightly with such bad luck that when it came out it broke.” His fate, he continues, was known shortly after: “15 days later we found him with the rope in his hands.” With the memory of what happened in Ribadelago still fresh, the Franco regime decided to silence the Monfragüe accident. The incident occurred on October 22 and on November 1 the NO-DO dedicated a brief space of 37 seconds to the news, remember The Daily Leapbehind a chronicle about a ball of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. Newspapers of the time, such as Above, Town either Alreadythey also passed on tiptoe about the tragedy. They officially recognized 54 fatalitiesbut there are those who raise the total number of deaths and missing people in the 1965 accident well above that figure, to more than a hundred. Specifying the exact amount is complicated. The workers remember that they moved 75 coffins and they were not enough to accommodate all the corpses. Some they even hold … Read more

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

June 29, 2025 by usatoday24

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. Villalba de Calatrava, a town of colonization of the Calatrava Campo (Ciudad Real) Campo. 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 … Read more

In 1938 Franco commissioned an experiment with prisoners in a monastery of Burgos. Thus began the search for the “communist” gene

February 15, 2025 by usatoday24

In the list of darker experiments that once launched in Spain there is one that continues to remain in the top positions. It happened at the end of the 1930s inside an architecture that today is historical heritage, A abbey trapped on the outskirts of Burgos. The basis for carrying out the study started from a premise as simple as Martian: The communist, is born or done? In search of the “red” gene. Between 1938 and 1939, In full Spanish Civil Warthe Franco regime undertook one of the most sinister experiments in its history. Under the direction of Psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-NájeraHead of the psychiatric services of Franco’s army, a study that sought to find a biological predisposition to Marxism, what he called the Marxist fanaticism biopsiquism. The purpose of this research was to demonstrate that communism and democratic ideologies were not the result of a conscious choice, but rather of A hereditary biopsychic tara, a mental inferiority that could be identified. Context: The regime psychiatrist. Vallejo-Nájera (1889-1960) was One of the most influential figures of Franco’s psychiatry. With training in Germany, where he came into contact with Nazi psychiatry, he developed a racial and genetic theory applied to the Spanish context, arguing that Marxism was the result of mental inferiority and that it should be eradicated from the root. In 1938, Franco assigned him the direction of the Psychiatric Services of the Francoist Armywhat allowed him to lead A pseudoscientific program based on eugenics, xenophobic psychology and coercive psychiatry. San Pedro de Cardeña became its experimentation laboratory, where international republican prisoners and brigades were subjected to evidence in order to “decipher” the communist psyche. Facade of the monastery The excuse. The study, financed and approved by Franco, It was developed for ten months, analyzing those prisoners of war through psychological testsanthropomorphic measurements and behavioral evaluations. Your conclusionspublished in the Spanish magazine of Medicine and War Surgery, would serve as justification for one of the most brutal policies of Franco: the systematic separation of the children of Republicans of their families to avoid their “ideological contagion”, the segregation of prisoners and The consolidation of a dictatorship that relied on scientific manipulation to eradicate dissent. The “study.” The epicenter of the investigation, as we said before, was the then concentration camp of San Pedro de Cardeñaan old monastery in Burgos that was converted into a detention center for Republican prisoners and International Brigades Members. The Vallejo-Nájera study divided prisoners into five large groupseach analyzed with preconceived hypothesis about their “biological degeneration.” Namely: International Brigadistas: It was sought to contrast their characteristics with those of Spanish prisoners to identify differences in the “origin of Marxism.” Spanish Republican prisoners: considered key to finding the “red gene.” Republican dams: it was claimed that their political participation responded to uncontrolled sexual impulses. Catalan prisoners: analyzed as “doubly dangerous” for their “Marxist fanaticism” and “antispañolism”. Basque prisoners: considered an “anomalous” group, as they were Catholics, but “contaminated by the revolutionary element.” Plus: the analysis included cranial measurements, facial studies and personality tests, all with the intention of finding common physical and psychological features between The Marxists. The results were not only biased, obvious, but served as an ideological basis for justifying the persecution and extermination of Republicans. Pseudoscientific conclusions. After months of “research”, Vallejo-Nájera He published his conclusions in the Spanish Magazine of Medicine and War Surgery. Among its most aberrant and extreme postulates, there were assertions such as Marxism is linked to mental inferiority. According to the psychiatrist, the communists were mostly “antisocial psychopaths” and His segregation from childhood would prevent society from “suffering its plague”. He also stressed that Democracies promote resentment. In his vision, democratic regimes allowed the “social failed” to triumph through public policies, in contrast to authoritarian regimes, which favored the most suitable. I also thought that Marxism was a racial phenomenon. Influenced by Nazi ideology, man proposed the need for “racial purification” to eradicate the elements considered “dangerous” to Spain. For all this, he indicated that The militarization of society was the only solution. In other words, he defended a model in which military discipline had to permeate all institutions, from school to the theater, to guarantee the “superiority of the Spanish race.” The role of women. Another of the darkest aspects of his study was the characterization of republican women as An “irrational” and “dangerous” being. According to Vallejo-Nájera Women participated in politics only for uncontrolled sexual impulsesand Marxism in women was a consequence of their “weak mental balance”, which made them more prone to cruelty. In fact and as we said, I thought that religion was the only one that could act as a brake to avoid its moral “corruption.” These ideas were also used as a justification to restrict women’s participation in public life and to establish a model of a woman submissive to the service of the homeland. The theft of children: applying the study. We indicate it at the beginning. One of the most abominable legacies of Vallejo-Nájera’s theories was The implementation of a forced separation system of the children of Republicans. His theory suggested that Children from Marxist families had to be separated from their parents to avoid its “ideological contamination.” What happened? That The reasoning resulted in the systematic theft of babiesa practice that continued even after Franco. In fact, it is estimated that thousands of children were taken from their families and delivered to institutions or families related to the regime, in what is considered one of the greatest crimes of Franco. Gestapo and Nazism. The San Pedro de Cardeña experiment was not carried out in isolation, but It was attended by members of the Gestapo and German scientists who conducted tests in Republican prisoners. This collaboration reflected the ideological and methodological links between Franco and Nazism, especially in the use of psychiatry as a tool of political repression. (Re) discovering the experiment. The truth is that, for decades, Vallejo-Nájera’s investigations were forgotten, protected by the silence imposed by Franco. So it … Read more

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