Campo de Los Almendros (Field of Almond Trees) was the makeshift concentration camp just north of the main City of Alicante where the thousands of Republicans rounded up on the dockside were taken by Franco's forces when Alicante became the final stronghold of the Spanish Republic to fall to the Nationalists on the 31st March 1939.
Today it remains a desolate place hemmed in by a wire fence and located just behind a shopping centre.There is little to mark its significance. A plaque laid down by the anarchists, a symbolic olive tree regularly subject to neo fascist vandalism and a couple of small signs that say nothing of what terror took place in this small corner of the Costa Blanca.
The field measures just 200 x 80 metres and yet estimates suggest that up to 30,000 prisoners passed through in its short time of operation. There was no food and no water and other estimates suggest that up to 2000 may have died, some machine gunned by Itialian troops on the slopes of the nearby hill. Where those victims of the fascists are buried is not clear but there must be many bodies beneath the barren landscape today.
The camp was dismantled on the 6th April with the prisoners dispersed, mainly to the labour camp at San Isidro/Albatera.
I will post from there shortly and will also look in more detail in a future post at the horrific terror of the surrender on the dockside at Alicante.
Campo de Los Almendros (Field of Almond Trees) was the makeshift concentration camp just north of the main City of Alicante where the thousands of Republicans rounded up on the dockside were taken by Franco's forces when Alicante became the final stronghold of the Spanish Republic to fall to the Nationalists on the 31st March 1939.
Today it remains a desolate place hemmed in by a wire fence and located just behind a shopping centre.There is little to mark its significance. A plaque laid down by the anarchists, a symbolic olive tree regularly subject to neo fascist vandalism and a couple of small signs that say nothing of what terror took place in this small corner of the Costa Blanca.
The field measures just 200 x 80 metres and yet estimates suggest that up to 30,000 prisoners passed through in its short time of operation. There was no food and no water and other estimates suggest that up to 2000 may have died, some machine gunned by Itialian troops on the slopes of the nearby hill. Where those victims of the fascists are buried is not clear but there must be many bodies beneath the barren landscape today.
The camp was dismantled on the 6th April with the prisoners dispersed, mainly to the labour camp at San Isidro/Albatera.
I will post from there shortly and will also look in more detail in a future post at the horrific terror of the surrender on the dockside at Alicante.
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