Murcia airport cannot be called Juan de la Cierva.
For now.
The Superior Court of Justice of Murcia has suspended the agreement adopted on May 12 by the regional Executive of Fernando López Miras, who has insisted since 2017 on giving that name to the aerodrome despite the Francoist past of his countryman.
The Government of Pedro Sánchez appealed the name to the courts, understanding that it violated the Law of Historical Memory due to the role that the Murcian aviator and engineer, inventor of the autogyro, played in the rental of the
Dragon Rapide
, the plane with which the soldier Francisco Franco flew from the Canary Islands to Tetuán to take command of the Africanist troops with which he perpetrated the 1936 coup d'état, established the dictatorship and carried out harsh repression.
For the Murcian Cabinet, his countryman was an inventor who revolutionized aeronautics and aviation, a man without political attributes.
The Contentious Chamber of the Superior Court of Murcia has agreed to suspend the agreement, but without going into the merits of the airport matter.
The magistrates understand that with the cessation of the change of name no harm is caused, since in reality the name Juan de la Cierva is like a surname of the name used until now of the International Airport of the Region of Murcia, as it comes to be the case of Madrid-Barajas-Adolfo Suárez.
A curious matter, because the local population calls it the Corvera airport or, simply, "the airport".
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Although the magistrates do not enter into deciding whether the name was well or poorly chosen, nor debate whether or not Juan de la Cierva was a Francoist, she considers that the Government's request for suspension "has the appearance of good law", because the State has the competence exclusively on airports and for a more practical reason.
“The general interest requires stability in the official name of an airport” and, if the change of name were not paralyzed and in the end the position of the State was fully accepted, “there would be the case of having to change again a name that It could have already been consolidated”, reads the order of the First Section of Administrative Litigation.
"On the contrary, with the suspension, the general use of the new name determined by the appealed resolution would only be delayed, in the event that the appeal was dismissed," they add.
If consulted on the Internet, the airport is named in both ways, with the Juan de la Cierva extension, on the pages most linked to the Murcian Government, and without it, those related to Aena.
The discussion about what the airport should be called has been going on for a long time, although the agreement of the Governing Council of the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia is from May 12, 2022. The name was approved by the Autonomous Assembly in July 2017, but the General Directorate of Civil Aviation discussed it from the beginning.
In June of last year, the Government made clear its rejection of the name change, understanding that the Historical Memory Law was not being complied with.
The question to resolve is whether Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu (Murcia 1895-London 1936) was a Francoist, who even has a foundation created in 1982, which was subsidized by the Ministry of Culture.
The engineer was in England when the Civil War broke out and contracted the Havilland
Dragon Rapide
plane for Franco , the device that was key to the start of the insurrection.
In addition, he served as an informal ambassador in London for the rebels.
On December 9, 1936, he died in a plane crash in London, when he was going to "Germany to complete an important armament order", according to the biography that appears in the Royal Academy of History, which reads: "The 1 October 1954, he was posthumously awarded the count of la Cierva by General Franco.
He has numerous distinctions, some from the Spanish Republic, such as the band of the Order of the Republic.
The reports prepared for the Secretary of State for Historical Memory reveal "the participation of the aviator and engineer Juan de la Cierva in the preparation of the attempted coup of July 18, 1936."
The report recalls that the Murcian inventor was sent to negotiate with Benito Mussolini so that he would send troops to support the rebels.
The Murcian Government maintains that the name of Juan de la Cierva "is a meeting point", "has never caused confrontation".
"On the contrary, the inventor of the autogyro has always been a meeting point, without his ideas arousing controversy, neither in that context of the Civil War nor in the most recent history of Spain," assured the regional Executive, which has of two reports favorable to the name of the airport on which he insists so much.