Concentration Camp Torremolinos

Concentration Camp Torremolinos

By Alfredo Bloy-Dawson

Towards the end of the Spanish Civil war Franco's Nationalist forces built a concentration camp in Torremolinos, one of many in the province of Malaga set up to hold captured Republican forces.
On March 30, 1938 prisoners started to arrive at the camp located in the Cortijo del Moro, land which was owned by the heirs of Don Jose Ruiz Soldado, Conde del Peñón y de la Vega.
This occupied an area which would border what is not the Casa de la Cultura in El Calvario, the Aquapark all the way toward the centre de menores which is next to the Palma de Mallorca public school.
Without barracks the concentration camp was an open-air one, without barracks or latrines.
By April 1, 1939 there were a registered 4,494 prisoners at the Torremolinos Concentration Camp.
According to several Spanish reports, the initial construction of some of the Malaga airport landing strips were carried out by the inmates of the concentration camp at Torremolinos.
In a 2006 article published in Britain's The Telegraph Andrew Roberts wrote: "Franco placed up to half a million Republicans in 190 concentration camps at the end of the war, to slave away in labour battalions for decades.
"He puts the long-disputed figure of those executed after the surrender at around 50,000 to 70,000."
One report suggests the number of prisoners who died in Franco's concentration camps between 1936 to 1947 may have reached 250,000.
David Serrano Blanquer, considered an authority on the subject said that before the end of the Spanish Civil War, "two high ranking officers of Franco's army travelled to the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, where local Nazi officials showed them the Third Reight's system of oppression. "