Qualla: Fosses de Paterna

Fosses de Paterna: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They called it La Paredassa d'Espanya — the great wall of Spain. In the cemetery of Paterna, just northwest of Valencia, an ordinary boundary wall became one of the most-used execution sites in the country. Against it, and into the numbered graves beyond it, the Franco regime put more than two thousand men and women who had stayed loyal to the Republic. Most were local people. Nearly all of them lay unnamed for decades, and only in recent years have their families begun, grave by grave, to bring them back.

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla

Fosses de Paterna: A Town on the Losing Side

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the town of Paterna remained loyal to the Second Spanish Republic. That loyalty carried a terrible cost. After the Nationalist victory in 1939, the new regime turned the town's cemetery into a place of reprisal. Between 1939 and 1956,...

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla

Fosses de Paterna: Who They Were

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

These were not soldiers falling in battle but civilians and captives, executed after the war was already lost. Ninety-four percent of the victims came from the Valencian Community itself — neighbours, in effect, killed close to home. Most were workers and farmers, town officials ...

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla

Fosses de Paterna: The Long Silence

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a very long time, nothing marked the numbered graves but the cemetery's own registers. Through the dictatorship, and for years after it ended, Spain largely chose not to look at what lay in places like Paterna. The dead stayed where they had fallen, mingled together in the ea...

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla

Fosses de Paterna: Grave by Grave

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The work of recovery is painstaking and slow. Archaeological and forensic teams have opened grave after grave, lifting commingled bones from pits that held dozens of people at once. One of them, Grave 94, became a symbol of the whole effort, its remains studied by DNA laboratorie...

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla

Fosses de Paterna: A Memorial at the Wall

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today the site is no longer a place of silence but of remembrance. A formal memorial to the victims of Francoist repression has been established at the Paterna cemetery — among the most significant of its kind in Spain — and the wall that was once a killing ground now hosts comme...

Read more: Fosses de Paterna on Qualla