Jesús García was born in the new town of Belchite, did military service in Madrid, worked in an auxiliary factory of the automotive industry in Zaragoza, and returned home to dedicate himself to cereals and olives, which have been the traditional source of wealth in his region. In Belchite, he raised his children. His earliest memories are from the early 1970s, 32 years after the most symbolic battle of the Civil War and six years after the last resident of Old Belchite left his home escorted by the Civil Guard. During that time, children played in the war ruins.
"We searched for bullets because the bombs had already been taken by kids five years older than us. Republican bullets were pointed; nationalist ones were round. Republican bullets had red powder in little squares, and nationalist ones were like ash. We made little piles with the powder and made them explode. We heated the projectiles, pierced them, and made beads for necklaces. It's crazy, it's a miracle we didn't all kill ourselves."
The children's games in Belchite included expeditions to the cellars of the cursed village and the roofs of its churches, which would succumb in a few years. Jesús García charmingly recounts life in Belchite. "We never stopped playing with other children because our families were on one side and theirs on the other," he says. Belchite was not a village traumatized by its dark summer of 1937.
Yet, its memory seems uncomfortable today: an American foundation, the World Monuments Fund (WMF), had to bring Belchite into the news. The ruins of the old village are now on the list of 25 sites whose salvation is urgent. Alongside them are the historical heritage of Gaza and the Old City of Antioch. What does urgency mean? "Every time I come, I find a wall that has collapsed," explains Pablo Longoria, WMF's executive director for Spain. The institution will not invest money in the village, but it will showcase it to its American donors.
And the Public Administrations? Alongside Longoria, María José de Andrés, manager of the Old Village of Belchite Foundation, Carmelo Pérez, the mayor of the municipality, and Joan Sastre, a Mallorcan engineer who convinced WMF that Belchite's case deserved attention, explain that the General State Budgets approved an investment of seven million euros over six years in 2022 to stabilize the ruins (never to rebuild) and facilitate visits and studies of the site. Then came the last electoral cycle, the Government transferred Belchite's file from the Ministry of Transport (formerly Development) to the Office of Democratic Memory, under the Presidency, the PP took over the Government of Aragon from the PSOE, and 2025 came without a single euro reaching the village.
In Belchite, the small works carried out in recent years (some repairs in the Church of San Martín and the Convent of San Rafael) have cost a few hundred thousand euros from local administrations. With seven million, it would be possible to stabilize all that remains of Old Belchite, refurbish its streets, and create a study center, explain María de José Andrés and Félix Pérez.
How is such abandonment possible in a country that has had a Historical Memory Law since 2007? Perhaps because Belchite does not represent a story of good versus bad, it does not offer any easy ethical relief. In the summer of 1936, contingents of Carlist and Falangist troops arrived in the village (then with 4,500 inhabitants), fortified it, and turned it into a base near the front, imprisoning and executing residents they deemed hostile. The socialist mayor Mariano Castillo documented the repression in a series of letters, was mutilated, committed suicide, and became a symbol of that year of Falangist repression. 500 people died.
In August 1937, the Republic launched a strategy aimed at Zaragoza to distract Franco's army from the Northern front. Their Chief of Staff, Vicente Rojo, predicted that Belchite would fall in a day. It held for 14, until the Republicans found a crack.
"There are many theories about why the attack failed. The general idea is that the Republicans fought with militias and were not organized," says Jesús García. "In the end, they took advantage of an irrigation ditch passing under the Church of San Agustín. They opened a hole in the ground and entered the village. The people inside were without water and exhausted, they couldn't resist anymore... They tried to escape through the Puerta del Pozo [south of the village]. In the mountains, their own lit bonfires as landmarks for them to escape, but the repression was brutal."
The Republicans were shot. The Falangists were killed with bayonets in the Plaza Nueva of Belchite, in a more or less square space where today only a few brick walls remain. By the end of that summer, Belchite had left 5,000 victims. A thousand of them were civilians.
So, it's not easy to portray Belchite as a moral example of anything. Franco tried to. "I swear to you that on these ruins of Belchite, a beautiful and spacious city will be built in homage to its unparalleled heroism," said the dictator, who ordered that Old Belchite not be restored, remaining as a symbol of "red barbarism" to the world.
Nevertheless, residents returned to their homes after the War and only gradually abandoned them over the next 24 years. "Of the destruction we see, 30% comes from the war. The other 70% is time and abandonment." There were looted goods. Initially, residents defied the surveillance of the Civil Guard to recover the iron balconies of their old houses. Later, thieves professionalized. "That was a taboo for many years," recalls Jesús García. "The older people didn't even want to hear about the old village." Until the past decade, the battle scene, a compact perimeter with only three entrances, had no control.
Today, Old Belchite, in its current state of ruin, is as moving as a Greek ruin in the eyes of a German poet. It is also photogenic: Spiderman: Far From Home and The Walking Dead have included shots filmed among its remains. Jesús García and Félix Pérez say that its Mudéjar architecture would be a tourist attraction for all of Europe today if it had been preserved. There is no reason to disagree with them.
And yes, the new town of Belchite exists. It has 1,500 inhabitants and, through the Old Village of Belchite Foundation, attracts thousands of students from Aragon to its educational programs. "My children have stayed in the village. In my generation, that didn't happen, those who could leave did," says Jesús García.