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Alexandre ROSA In La Savina and just a few feet from one of the main roads that cross the island of Formentera, the so-called PM-820 , we find the remains of what is known as Es Campament . We are talking about a penal colony that between 1940 and 1942 was home to what would be the equivalent of a third of the island's population. It may not be familiar to us, although we have probably passed by it more than once. It is located on the road that connects the port of La Savina with Sant Francesc Xavier and the La Mola lighthouse. This space has been declared an Asset of Cultural Interest by the Formentera Island Council and today only some walls and a plaque remain. In it you can read a poem by Joan Coromines titled “The Cemetery of the Living.” It is part of the history of Formentera and is a place that has remained engraved in the memory of all its inhabitants. Historical context and construction of the prison It's Camp It's Camp.
Photograph taken by the British Royal Air Force in 1942. By Fòrum per a la Memoria d'Eivissa i Formentera In order to know a little more about Es Campament , also called Sa Colònia or Es Camp de Presos, we have to go back to 1939. It was ordered to be built by the Franco regime, it depended on the Provincial Prison of Palma de Mallorca and was built by the people themselves. prisoners (walls, barracks, facilities, etc.). It is said that a total of 1,400 Republican prisoners were held there Cell Phone Number List and the reason for building this structure on the island was surely its isolation. On the other hand, as explained by Antoni Ferrer, Doctor in History from the Autonomous University of Barcelona , it was also created to decongest the Can Mir prison and the Provincial Prison of Palma de Mallorca. Formentera has always been somewhat more isolated, but at that time it was even more so, until the tourist boom began around the 1960s and 1970s. The colony not only had prisoners from the island, it also had prisoners from the rest of the peninsula (Murcia, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Badajoz, etc.).
It is said that it was one of the toughest colonies and that it was made up of around 20 wooden barracks, two stories high and all following the same pattern: bunk beds and a hallway in the middle. It had a fence but you can also say that it had a natural fence, the sea. As a curious fact, it was not until relatively recently that a detailed vertical photograph of what the colony was like (distribution of barracks, etc.) was seen for the first time. As the professor at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) Celso García comments in the interview for Diario de Ibiza: “The unpublished photo was taken by a flight of the British Royal Air Force ( RAF) that left of Gibraltar in November 1942.” After searching for this photograph in the National Archives of the United States: “I was looking at the first vertical photograph of the Savina concentration camp, and no one had seen it.” In the photograph, thanks to the shadows and quality, you can also see the prisoners in the yard. It was a men's prison and, as established by several studies, 58 people died there and were buried in the new Sant Francesc cemetery. This year, exhumation tasks have begun to recover the bodies that were buried in graves, identify them, return them to their families and thus recover their memory.
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發表於 2024-2-19 17:20:10
