A wee piece on a Spanish Civil War battleground- "The invitation of Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal to venture down an archaeologist’s rabbit hole, into a dimension of reverse-engineered history, is surely appropriate for the journey he and his colleagues have made, both this year and last. Belchite, a town in the northern Spanish province of Zaragoza, still feels the ghost of General Francisco Franco, in the wind and within the decaying ruins of a town ordered by Franco to remain as a ‘living’ memorial, after its total destruction in the Spanish Civil War. Alfredo has returned for 2 consecutive years to do battle with this singular ghost, assembling his own army of like-minded archaeologists, anthropologists and volunteers. Forty years after his death, Franco’s ghost town still casts a shadow over the new town, built by the defeated and captured Republican soldiers of the second Republican government, in place of the shattered original. Its reformation began as their progressive values, belief systems and personal constitutions were systematically degraded by forced labour, inadequate nourishment, political suppression, and constant fear of death. Separated by a single road, the new town has been described as a ‘fascist’ design of straight roads, and an uninspiring, inorganic grid system. There is no mistaking the scrawny, elongated angels perched on the minaret-tower of the mudejar church at the town centre, or the yoke and arrows (el yugo y las flechas) insignia high on a wall opposite – both are incontrovertible signs of the right-wing Falange movement, which Franco ideologically identified with. " http://bizarreculture.com/the-ruins-of-belchite-ghostly-reminder-of-the-spanish-civil-war/
