The sites of repression of the Spanish civil war and Franco's dictatorship remained hidden and largely unknown to the public until the beginning of the 21st century. The Movement for the Recovery of Historic Memory stemmed from civil society contributed to make visible not only the nature of the events themselves, but also the places where they occurred: former prisons and buildings that were turned into temporary jails during the war, walls turned into firing squads and above all, unmarked mass graves. In the last two decades, the extent of the repression in its most dramatic and visible aspect has been collected and documented through different mechanisms, including the so-called Map of Graves, promoted by the Government of Spain, which shows the location and state of the graves (identified, exhumed, disappeared...) and more recently through the Spanish Democratic Memory Law (2022). However, these legal measures have turned out to be insufficient. The politics of memory have focused almost exclusively in the treatment of the human remains, leaving aside a global treatment of other material elements found in the graves as well as the preservation of the post-conflict landscape for future generations. Today, many of these unmarked graves have physically disappeared once the exhumation was carried out. Others, as it happened with other memorial landmarks, are recurrently vandalized. In the absence of concrete measures taking into account memory’s spatial dimension, the traces of the Francoist repression seem doomed to disappear from the landscape. Driving from long-term fieldwork on the transmission of the memory of the Spanish civil war repression, this paper focuses on the future of these repression sites in the Basque Country, addressing three different ways these places are remembered: officially turned into heritage, maintained through the voluntary work of memorialist associations and individuals, or simply, erased.
