Málaga’s efforts to honour victims of the Spanish civil war have been blighted by allegations that the city council has accidentally built a dog park on the site of a mass grave that once contained the remains of hundreds of people massacred during the conflict.
About 4,500 people are thought to have been shot against the walls of the city’s San Rafael cemetery and then buried in huge pits, making it one of Europe’s largest mass graves.
Over recent years, 2,840 bodies have been exhumed from the cemetery and reburied as part of Spain’s continuing attempts to come to terms with the civil war and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Although Málaga has been praised for its work in recovering the bodies and building a commemorative park, some now claim that what the council calls a dog park – but critics refer to as a dog toilet – has been built over one of the mass graves.
Despite assurances from the council that the graves would be respected during the construction of the new park, the local historical memory association says the dog area sits on top of a grave site clearly mapped on GPS and marked with white gravel.
“San Rafael cemetery is the biggest mass grave in Europe after those in the former Yugoslavia,” said José Sánchez, president of the Málaga Historical Memory Association.
“When we realised last October that what they were building was a pipi can – where there’s basically just a tap and a bin where you put the bags after you’ve cleaned up after your dog – it seemed totally illogical. They’ve built a pipi can above one of the biggest graves in the cemetery.”
Bolstered by confirmation from one of the archaeologists who led the exhumation operations that the dog park is indeed over a grave, the association is now asking Málaga’s council to acknowledge the mistake and to make sure all the grave sites are protected and respected.
Sánchez said while he did not want to entertain the notion that what had happened was anything other than a mistake, the council needed to honour its commitments.
“There are thousands of Malagueños buried in the park and it’s part of the history of Málaga,” said Sánchez. “I can’t abide there being an area where dogs do their business when I know that beneath it, there’s a grave that 800 or 1,000 people once lay in.”
A spokesman for the council, which is led by the conservative Popular party, did not know whether the claims were correct, adding that it had used information provided on graves by Málaga’s Association Against Silence and Forgetting and for the Recovery of Historical Memory.
He also pointed out that the council’s “pioneering” work to honour the dead had achieved far more than many Spanish cities.
“They’re now saying that the dog park is above one of the graves,” he said. “We still don’t know if that’s right. The park was designed according to the information the council received from the association and in the belief that there were no graves beneath it. We would never have built it if we’d thought there was a grave underneath.”
Spain’s socialist party is calling on the town-planning councillor to step down over the issue. “First, we want the pipi can removed,” said María Gámez, Málaga spokeswoman for the PSOE.
“The archaeologist who did the exhumations has confirmed it’s on a grave site. We also want the planning officer to resign. This hasn’t been a simple error because it would have been easy to check and they didn’t.”
