Spain’s mass graves, place by place and name by name

6,040 places#

Each mark is a grave on the Spanish state’s map: a cemetery corner, a roadside ditch, a well, a ravine. People killed in the civil war of 1936–1939, or under the Franco dictatorship that followed, were buried in them. Not all are mass graves: 1,703 records list a single person.

The figures in the records add up to 112,724 people; another 1,367 records give no figure. That is a sum of what each record reports, not a checked count of people. For 3,093 graves the record lists extrajudicial executions among the circumstances of death. The map also holds soldiers killed in battle (754 graves), people killed in the Republican zone and civilians killed in other acts of war.

At least 8,346 people are listed as “desconocido”, unknown: the record counts them but gives no name.

The shape of a mark shows the grave’s status on the map. Its size, how many people the record lists.

Never exhumed#

2,465 graves are recorded as not exhumed. Their records add up to 30,190 people, and 13,594 named people are linked to them.

302 of them are marked “dignificada”: the site has been marked or honoured, but not dug. Another 53 were found by a survey and not exhumed.

Exhumed#

1,246 graves are recorded as fully exhumed and 285 as partly exhumed. In October 2000 at Priaranza del Bierzo, in León, at the request of a grandson of one of them, a team exhumed 13 Republicans killed at the start of the war. That dig is usually taken as the start of the exhumations of recent decades.

Since then, families’ associations, regional governments, universities and lately the state have dug. The ministry says its exhumation plans had recovered 8,941 bodies by November 2025. An exhumed grave does not mean the people in it have been identified: the bones often wait years for DNA tests.

Moved to the Valley of Cuelgamuros#

Between 1959 and 1983 the state moved the remains of 33,833 people, in 11,060 boxes, into the crypts of the basilica in the Valley of Cuelgamuros, which Franco built outside Madrid.

The map records 500 graves moved there, a median 313 km from the Valley and as far as 1,740 km. 26,571 people appear in their records, 42% of everyone on the map. No other kind of grave holds as many recorded people. The Valley received the dead of both sides, combatants and victims of repression alike; 321 of these 500 records give no circumstance of death. Some graves were moved only in part, and the 500 records together add up to 34,527 people, more than the Valley’s 33,833.

Some families were never asked. José Severo Arregui Lasa died in 1938 aged 19, was buried at Mondariz in Galicia and was moved to the Valley in 1959 with other bodies, among them Cecilio Ruiz de Loizaga, also buried at Mondariz, “without the consent of their families”, the ministry wrote on 30 January 2026, the day the remains of the two men were handed back to their families in San Sebastián. The map still links him to the Mondariz grave. Forensic teams have worked in the crypts since 2023; by August 2026 they had recovered 602 bodies from the 21 towns and villages whose families had asked for a search, and identified 25 people.

Lost#

522 graves are recorded as “desaparecida”: lost. The reasons vary: a cemetery rebuilt, a site built over or disturbed, a spot nobody can place any more. The label alone does not say whether remains survive. The records add up to 10,037 people, and 4,708 named people are linked to them.

At Almuñécar, on the Granada coast, a grave thought to hold 16 anti-Franco guerrillas was destroyed when the San Miguel castle, site of the old cemetery, was restored.

Searched for and not found: Lorca’s road#

233 sites were searched without finding the grave or the remains sought. Three of them are near Víznar and Alfacar, outside Granada, where Federico García Lorca was shot in August 1936 with a schoolteacher, Dióscoro Galindo, and two banderilleros, Francisco Galadí and Joaquín Arcollas. Accounts place it on the night of the 16th to the 17th or of the 17th to the 18th.

In 2009 the Andalusian government dug six possible pits at Fuente Grande: nothing. A dig in 2014 was halted before it found anything; another in 2016 found no bones, only a bullet and a cartridge case. The state map links Lorca’s name to another record, the partly exhumed graves of the Víznar ravine, where, El Salto reported in September 2026, a University of Granada team had recovered 194 people since 2021 and identified 17. He has not been identified among them.

In September 2026 La bola negra, the film Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi built from four pages of an unfinished Lorca play, opened in Spanish cinemas. Lorca’s body is still missing.

Where the state map and the regions’ lists differ#

The state map is put together from what regional governments, universities and associations send in. For Catalonia it has 164 graves. The Generalitat’s own register has 1,082: 628 confirmed, 452 probable and 2 without a category. The two lists have not been matched grave by grave and may not define a grave the same way, but the gap is wide. On the map, the Catalan register’s graves are the small squares.

Elsewhere the state map holds more than the regions’ own open lists: 891 graves against 615 in Andalusia, 1,041 against 701 in Castile and León, 651 against 529 in the Valencian Community. An empty corner of the map may mean that nothing was reported, not that nobody died there.