Memorial groups have asked Spain’s central government to designate the surviving buildings of the former Lavacolla concentration camp as a Democratic Memory Site. The camp held more than 2,000 people during the Franco dictatorship, and its prisoners endured overcrowding, cold, hunger, illness and physical and verbal violence, according to historians cited in the materials supporting the request.

The camp operated in a former tannery about three kilometres from the airport at Santiago de Compostela, now called Lavacolla-Rosalía de Castro. From 1936 until well into the 1940s, the Franco regime maintained 11 concentration camps in Galicia. Many people held at Lavacolla came from outside the region, a practice memorial groups say was intended to separate prisoners from their support networks.

Those detained included people classified by the dictatorship as opponents, deserters, foreign Republican soldiers and men sentenced by military courts to forced labour. Historians have also documented efforts by residents of nearby villages, including Bama, O Amenal, Vilachá and Arca, to help prisoners.

From 1940, the site housed newly formed Disciplinary Battalions of Worker Soldiers. Members of these units were forced to work on the expansion of the airport’s runways, which had previously served as an aerodrome. The regime closed the camp’s facilities around 1945.

Accounts by survivors and official records describe poor conditions, including inadequate lighting, earthen floors and rudimentary systems for disposing of waste. A report by Manuel Canellas Tapias, then head of the 81st Division, described the facilities’ hygiene as “frankly deficient.”

The request to the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory was initiated by researchers Alexandra Rose Briere and Rossalía Macías Tarrío of Colectivo Pipueca. It is supported by several cultural, historical and memorial organisations in Galicia, as well as two bookshops. The former camp buildings are now used as a hotel and a pilgrims’ hostel; one barrack remains closed. The site lies on the French Way of the Camino de Santiago.

The government has so far designated five Democratic Memory Sites in Galicia: the former camps on San Simón Island and at Santo Antón in A Coruña, the Pazo de Meirás, the Campo de Aragón in Ourense, the Provincial Prison of Lugo and the city of Ferrol.

Sources: elDiario.es.