Paterna will have a 'Memorial of the Victims' of Franco's repression in the cemetery where the unidentified remains will rest

The Ministry of Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality will collaborate with the Paterna City Council for the execution and maintenance of the first phase of the work of the 'Memorial of the Victims' of the Francoist repression of the cemetery of the location.

The memorial will consist of the creation of a space that includes a public access enclosure and a work structure that symbolizes and serves as a tribute and memory of the victims of the Franco dictatorship who died in defense of democracy and the constitutional regime of the Second Republic, which have been exhumed from the mass graves of the Paterna cemetery.

This memorial will house the unidentified remains exhumed from the Paterna cemetery, as well as all those who, having been exhumed and identified, their relatives decide to rebury in this location. In this way, it will become a public space in which respect for the victims and tranquility and comfort for visitors are adequately combined.

The space will be declared a Place of Memory of the Valencian Community, for this, it will be conveniently signposted for the dissemination and disclosure of the democratic values ​​that it represents, specifically, the rights of the victims and their families to truth, justice , repair and guarantee of non-repetition.

The Generalitat will make a total investment of one million euros to carry out the project for the construction structure and the site, a cost that will be financed through the Department of Democratic Quality.

The agreement will be in force until the completion of the project works and, in any case, the maximum term of validity will be four years, extendable for four more years by agreement of the parties.

For its part, the Paterna City Council will authorize the temporary special use of the cemetery plot located in the first section of square 3 of the same so that the execution of the works can be carried out. It will also be in charge of the management, maintenance and conservation assuming the corresponding expenses of the work structure and the enclosure, once finished and received.

In turn, it will make the municipal technical means available to the Department of Democratic Quality to advise in the preparation phase of the technical documentation and participate in the monitoring and supervision of the work and in the approval of its reception.

Victims of Franco's repression

In the Municipal Cemetery of Paterna there are around 135 mass graves where victims of Franco's repression were deposited after being executed in 'El Paredón' or 'El Terrer' , located about 500 meters from the cemetery and in other places in the municipality.

A total of 2,238 people from different municipalities of the Valencian Community were murdered, as well as from other localities in the national territory. They were men and women committed to defending the values ​​that the Second Republic represented; values ​​of freedom, equality, progress, solidarity and citizenship.

The Paterna cemetery is the place in the Valencian Community where the execution of the greatest number of crimes against humanity has been verified once the war ended and the second in the State after the wall of the eastern cemetery in Madrid. The beginning of this genocide began on the same day, April 3, 1939, two days after the declaration of the end of the Civil War, until 1956, when the last murder of an anti-Franco guerrilla fighter took place in Terrer.

Dignified place for the victims

The relatives of these victims, constituted in associations, began in 2010 to carry out exhumation processes in the Paterna cemetery and to this day, with the participation of the Generalitat since 2019, they continue to fight to exhume these graves and bring the victims to light.

The vast majority of family associations do not want the identified remains to be reburied in the graves that for so many years have hidden the terror of their murders and the anguish and pain of their families. In addition, there are currently close to a thousand unidentified remains waiting, provisionally stored in the custody of the Paterna city council, to find a decent place for their reburial.

This figure is expected to increase as exhumations progress, given that up to now the percentage of identifications has been low, mainly due to incompatibility of family members or due to the state of DNA degradation of the skeletal remains, as well as the extraction techniques used.