#basque spain

[avery-suzanne-blog]

day 38: almost at the alberque. we ran into our Russian friend, whose name i cannot remember. she was hot, tired, and out of water. she and I walked together so she could sip my camel bak. we all made it to the donativo and had long showers to wash off the long day 

[outstarethestars]

Tourists come in search of the old quarter. "We have to tell them there isn't one, that it was bombed to the ground," explains Luis Iriondo, an 89-year-old artist who lived through the bombing as a child. He recalls how incendiary bombs sent fire sweeping through the town, killing those in bomb shelters and destroying four out of every five buildings. "Each explosion was followed by a blast of air," he says, recalling that it was a busy market day in a town already packed with refugees. "They were horridly warm, as if they tasted of death." "I spent four hours staring up terrified at the sky," recalls Iriondo's friend Enrique Aranzábal. "After the Spanish civil war I went to sea and ended up working with a German who had flown in those planes. He told me they treated it as a training mission."

One of the enduring stories from the Spanish Civil War is the bombing of Guernica by the Fascists helped by the Germans. The destruction was the inspiration for one of Pablo Picasso's most famous works, Guernica. The Guardian has a piece on the upcoming film about Picasso's time painting the piece, as well as Guernica today, which is enjoying a time of relative calm now that ETA is no longer as violent as it was.

For the past few decades Guernica has busily been putting the record straight about what really happened on 26 April 1937. "Franco claimed it was burned to the ground by 'separatist reds', but that was a lie," says Gorroño. "Part of what we had to do to begin with was allow historians to tell the true story," says opposition leader Luis Ortúzar as we pass a bust of George Steer, the Times correspondent who alerted the world to the devastating bombardment. The call for the Guernica picture to be moved here from Madrid's Reina Sofía museum is unlikely to be answered; experts say the vast canvas is too delicate has already travelled too much. It has toured Europe twice and went to the US in 1939 to raise funds for civil war refugees. It did not come to Spain until 1981, following Picasso's wishes, when democracy had been restored. The number of dead from the bombing has been put at up to 1,654. The town's registered population was just 5,630 inhabitants. The fact that the town's arms factories and main bridge were spared shows that civilians were targeted before more obvious military objectives.

To think, this happened seventy-five years ago.

[a-different-place]

artwork by laa