Sant Miquel dels Reis. A Francoist prison "erased"

Abstract

The period in which Sant Miquel dels Reis monastery was a Francoist prison remains a relevant gap in the history of Valencia. The written and published testimony of six prisoners and fifty-one images are the main evidence of the existence of a prison during the years after the war, and until 1966. The restoration works carried out in the prison-monastery between 1994 and 2000 were accompanied by an intense historical-archaeological study that has made it possible to recover the monastic spaces from their beginnings in the 14th century until their transformation into a Presidio Nacional in 1867. The works, carried out to accommodate the Biblioteca Valenciana, have restored the appearance of the monastery to its XVI golden age. Despite these years of architectonic intervention, the direction of the project did not contemplate recovering any material elements of the prison or documenting even the distribution of the interior spaces. Therefore, cells, workshops, bedrooms, bathrooms, administration offices, kitchen, infirmary or school have disappeared from an interpretation repression place during the dictatorship. In addition, most of the written records generated during decades of dictatorship have disappeared. Mountains of the prison’s inside elements were sold for scrap during the restoration process, decades of wall graffiti were erased, and piles of written documents and wooden items were burned in the building’s outer courtyards.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest among academics and the public to understand the mechanisms and consequences of Franco’s policies against its opponents. In this sense, the typology of repressive spaces coordinated by the state and its new authorities have become relevant. Concentration camps, forced labor camps, prisons, boarding schools, detention centers, sanatoriums, and orphanages made possible a social and political control never before experienced in our contemporary history. Sant Miquel dels Reis prison was a symbol of this political repression, housing thousands of republican prisoners convicted for political reasons. The recovery for the citizenship of this place of memory involves a research task, with the aim of filling the innumerable gaps that have reached us up to the present. A process not without obstacles that must be overcome in order to resignify the place.