A day both heavy and light

We were woken up at 7 o’clock as usual before a quick breakfast. The whole class was supposed to be seated on a bus at 8.30, so we all had to hurry to get ready.

As soon as everyone was on the bus, we set course to a small town outside of Sevilla, La Puebla de Cazalla.

We arrived at the local cemetery in La Puebla de Cazalla and everyone stretched a little after leaving the bus. Inside the cemetery we met Mari-Carmen España. She was one of the first to start digging up the forgotten history about the spanish civil war during the reign of Francisco Franco. A swedish film producer, Pontus Hjortén, was also with us as translator. Pontus and Mari-Carmen did a movie together “The end of silence”, which we saw as a preparation for our visit. Mari-Carmen told us about how she as a young girl was curious about her grandfathers death during the war. But with no information at all about the war, she took the matter in her own hands as an adult. This led to one of the first excavations of mass graves in Andalucia and was one of the starting points for many other excavations all over Spain. She tells us that the ground we are standing on once was the mass grave her grandfather was buried in. Even though the mood was down, I couldn’t help but feel positive because people are starting to talk about the dark history that has been forgotten. It needs to be noticed and acknowledged. I asked a friend to translate to spanish for me and talked a bit with Mari-Carmen before we went to the bus. She wished us good luck and asked us to keep digging up buried history, like she has done, literally.

After the heavy information we got, the rest of the day was a piece of cake. We spent a couple of hours in the beautiful city of Seville, where we acted like typical tourists and took photos in front of everything. It was incredibly pleasant and the ice-cream we got was absolutely worth the 5,5 € we paid for it. When it was time for the bus ride home a lot of people fell asleep and slept all the way back to Cádiz and Gunilla.

Tindra Dahlström

Portside