- Time of past OR future Camino
- Francés and routes in Andalucia
I must have missed this thread in 2018...so we almost missed the memorial at Alto del Perdón yesterday; I’m putting a note here so perhaps some others who missed the original post will be aware of it. We expected to see the iconic sculptures, the crowds of pilgrims taking photos, and the massive wind turbines, but the poignant memorial written about in the thread above was one we hadn’t seen mention of in our guidebooks. Luckily, just before we started to descend, we caught sight of the spiral of 19 standing stones with a pillar in the middle. A sign nearby explained that this was a memorial to 92 people from 19 villages in the Sierra del Perdón who lost their lives in 1936 and 1937. The sign says:
“This is a tribute to the victims and their families who were killed for fighting for their ideals of social justice and democracy. In Navarra there wasn’t a front during the war, and these people were killed without a trial, deprived of their homes by force, and buried in mass graves in this land, all of them forgotten and silenced for 81 years by the institutions.”
It was a moving experience to stand by the stones and contemplate the message and the names and ages of those memorialized.
For those starting the Mozárabe in Almería, there is a similar monument near the end of the English Cable. It memorializes the 142 Almerians who died after being deported to Mauthausen.
(Note: The original thread has several cautions about not turning this sensitive topic into a political discussion.)
“This is a tribute to the victims and their families who were killed for fighting for their ideals of social justice and democracy. In Navarra there wasn’t a front during the war, and these people were killed without a trial, deprived of their homes by force, and buried in mass graves in this land, all of them forgotten and silenced for 81 years by the institutions.”
It was a moving experience to stand by the stones and contemplate the message and the names and ages of those memorialized.
For those starting the Mozárabe in Almería, there is a similar monument near the end of the English Cable. It memorializes the 142 Almerians who died after being deported to Mauthausen.
(Note: The original thread has several cautions about not turning this sensitive topic into a political discussion.)