Digitally Mapping the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War

To this day, thousands of mass graves in towns and the countryside across Spain constitute a grim legacy of the country’s infamous Civil War. Yet these graves themselves have their own politically fraught history as old as the war itself, and they now constitute the most important focal point of Spain’s ongoing debate about how the war should be remembered. In this episode, Dr. Wendy Perla Kurtz traces this history and describes recent efforts to exhume these graves and give the war’s victims a proper burial. She also discusses her own efforts to contribute to the historical memory through her online project, entitled Virtual Cartographies, which is an interactive digital map of all the mass grave sites in Spain where users can access multimedia documentation of commemorations that have taken place at each site.