Travels Through the Spanish Civil War

A revelatory journey into the physical and visual legacies of the Spanish Civil War, investigating how a brutal conflict is memorialised, and obscured, today.

The Spanish Civil War was one of the twentieth century’s most momentous conflicts.

Nick Lloyd explores its causes and consequences through various road trips across Spain and into the rest of Europe. Setting off from Barcelona, he journeys around Catalonia and Aragón, among the last regions to fall to Franco. Visiting battle sites, museums, memorials and more, he reveals how the scars of violence still criss-cross Spain’s rural and urban landscapes. Along the way, he encounters historians, writers and descendants of Republican fighters, who bring to life the experiences of combatants and civilians alike. He tells the story of Francesc Boix, a photographer born metres from the author’s home, whose short but eventful life took him from the Catalan front to the Nuremberg witness box. In Huesca, he meets a dogged journalist working to unearth local history, while amid the rubble of Belchite, he describes the brutal street combat that destroyed the town. And on the Franco-Spanish border, he traces the journey of the refugees who fled fascism, only to be incarcerated in French concentration camps.

As debates over ‘historical memory’ reopen deep rifts in Spanish society, Lloyd powerfully chronicles how war is remembered—or not—in Spain and beyond.