Travels Through the Spanish Civil War

Fifty years after Franco’s death, and almost ninety since the Civil War began, the scars of violence still run deep in Spain.

Nick Lloyd traces this legacy through a series of road trips. Travelling through Catalonia and Aragón, among the last Republican strongholds, he visits battle sites, museums, memorials and more. Speaking with historians, local guides and descendants of International Brigaders, he discovers how places and objects offer clues to a painful past. A Barcelona plaque, metres from the author’s home, commemorates the birthplace of Francesc Boix, a photographer whose short but eventful life took him from the Catalan front to the Nuremberg witness box. In Huesca, a dogged journalist builds monuments to his city’s wartime resistance, while the preserved ruins of Belchite mark the devastation of fierce street fighting. A journey across the Franco-Spanish border follows the footsteps of the anti-fascist refugees later incarcerated in French concentration camps.

As debates over ‘historical memory’ highlight enduring political rifts, Lloyd powerfully chronicles how war is remembered—or not—in Spain and beyond.