Video | This is how the relatives of the prisoners of the Valley of the Fallen lived

A team of experts from the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), dependent on the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), has been carrying out, with permission from the National Heritage, surveys and excavations in the working-class town of Valle de los Caídos since last 27 of April.

The objective is to rebuild the living conditions of its inhabitants.

The works have been launched through a government grant worth 12,000 euros and are part of the actions being carried out by the Ministry of Democratic Memory led by the first vice president, Carmen Calvo.

To an inexperienced eye, the Banús camp, named after the company that built the viaduct and the access road to the monument with the prisoners of the Civil War as labor, could seem like a natural setting. “Information on shanty towns is practically non-existent, so in this case it is archeology that has to help create the historical account,” explains Alfredo González Ruibal, the project director. Thanks to the study of planes and aerial photographs of the time, as well as the testimony of Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, a prisoner who managed to escape from the Valley in 1948, the team of excavators has managed to locate some 40 shacks in which the relatives of the prisoners, and in the video that accompanies this news you can see how they try to give them back their voice by recreating their day to day.

Luis Manuel Rivas / THE COUNTRY