"Grave of the railroad workers" believed to have been discovered in La Legua dig

An intense week of digging in the area known as La Legua, in the city limits of Gumiel de Izán in Burgos province, has yielded 59 skeletons in a mass grave over 30 meters long dating back to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The forensic expert and expedition coordinator, Francisco Etxeberria, says the victims were piled up here in six layers, and that some were executed on the spot, 75 years ago.

"We found rifle cases and broken bullets near the bones that they hit. Most of the skulls have bullet holes," he explains.

The executioners did not have time to kill everyone they wanted to, because this particular grave was built to fit even more bodies: the last 10 meters of it were still lying empty when the grave was reopened recently. "This is a very carefully prepared grave," explains José Ignacio Casado, a researcher with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which works to find the bodies of people executed during the war and Franco's ensuing repression.

"The bodies were covered with lime. They were buried by the street sweepers of Aranda de Duero after having all valuables stolen from them, people from the village have told us. Some residents still remember seeing them [the sweepers] walk by wearing the clothes of the missing people."

Despite the looting, the bones still yielded a few objects which provide valuable clues about their owners. Marbles were found next to the bodies of two 18-year-olds; another body had an orthopedic corset that Fernando Lorente hopes belonged to his grandfather Fernando Macario Martínez, a train engineer at the Aranda de Duero station.

"He had participated in a few UGT [labor union] protests, and when the military coup took place he fled to the mountains. Later they told him he could come back, and he did. He was immediately arrested," his grandson recalls.

It was not a quick death. "Apparently my grandfather was not properly executed. The day after shooting him, the murderers returned and my grandfather, who was still alive, asked them for water. They pissed in his face and finished him off. I know this because the murderers apparently boasted about it later through town."

Another item that turned up near one set of bones was a 10-centimeter crucifix of the type that hangs around the neck, which leads Casado to believe that the victim might be Emiliano María Revilla, a Franciscan monk who was arrested by a group of Falangists on July 29, 1936 in his home village for being "a red priest who protested about the miserable, hungry condition of peasants."

Father Revilla was taken to the central prison in Burgos. He came out of it on September 4 inside a sack, with another 13 people. It was not until 1950 that he was officially declared dead.

For now, however, these are all hypotheses. Technicians at labs in the University of the Basque Country and Madrid's Autónoma University have a long task ahead of them. So do the researchers José Ignacio Casado and José María Rojas, who now must find the relatives of these nameless bones and confirm whether this grave is, in fact, the famous "grave of the railroad workers" that they have been seeking for years.

"On August 18, 1936 alone they say that 60 railroad workers were murdered, most of whom were members of the UGT and [the anarchist] CNT unions," explains Casado.

"In Aranda de Duero they always talked about a grave where around 50 people might be buried, nearly all railroad employees," adds Rojas. "This spot coincides in the number of bodies, and also because the corset could belong to one of them. If this is not the right grave, then it is likely that the 1980s construction work on the nearby highway eliminated those bodies."

A man named Domingo, who was a local councilor and later justice of the peace in Gumiel de Izán, led investigators to this grave that yielded 59 bodies. The spot is barely 300 meters from another grave where Etxeberria and his team disinterred another 85 bodies in 2003. According to Casado, "just in the stretch of land known as Ribera del Duero of Burgos, nearly 700 people were assassinated in the summer of 1936."