introduction

This blog has been set up to trace some of the key sites around Alicante and the Costa Blanca from the Spanish Civil War and to try and uncover some of the hidden history. With hundreds of thousands of Brits starting their holidays as their plane lands at Alicante Airport you can bet that only a handful know the brutal, and fairly recent, past of the area. Alicante was the final city to fall to the Nationalists with huge loss of life and the repression and brutalisation of those sympathetic to the Republican cause. On this blog I will document my research into the subject and post photographs. My own journey into this area of research started when I stumbled upon some gun emplacements while walking the hills around El Faro that overlook the town of Santa Pola. They are pictured at the top of this post. From a Spanish guy in a bar close by I found out that there were where the Republican forces attempted to shoot down the planes from Hitlers Condor Legion and Mussolini's air force as they mounted their relentless bombing campaign of Alicante. That was enough to encourage me to dig deeper into the buried history of the area.