Castalla will invest 51,160 euros to exhume the victims of the Civil War and the Dictatorship
- This activity has received 38,370 euros in aid from the Generalitat and the aim is to recover the historical memory of the town
Castalla Town Council has decided to commit to the recovery of historical memory in the town and will invest 51,160 euros to exhume the victims of the Civil War and the Dictatorship. This action has a grant of 38,370 euros from the Department of Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality of the Generalitat Valenciana. The actions will be carried out in the municipal cemetery of Alicante over the next two years.
The mayor of Castalla, Antonio Bernabeu, explained that “our intention is to help families who need to know where the remains of their ancestors rest, so that they can rest in our town’s cemetery”.
For her part, the councillor for Heritage, Maite Gimeno, has reported on the details of this initiative, which arose after a group of local people contacted her area to make progress in this area. Gimeno declared that “the council is committed to the recovery of historical memory and we are going to work in coordination with other town councils in the identification and exhumation work”.
The actions to be carried out will consist of drafting the project during the year 2021; and the excavation and identification tasks, the field work, in 2022.
According to the information gathered by the City Council, thanks to the previous work of the ‘Association of Relatives Reprisoned by Franco in the Cemetery of Alicante’ and the group of people castellut, up to 25 people from the town would have been shot in this historical period. Thus, 5 of them could be found in grave number 32 of the cemetery – where the excavations will be carried out – along with 14 other victims of the Civil War.