Half an hour’s drive uphill from the busy beaches of Nerja, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, lies the isolated village of El Acebuchal, pretty but spookily quiet, apart from the birdsong, on a summer’s morning. Seventy five years ago, its people were victims of a grievous injustice.
In August 1948 Francisco Franco’s Guardia Civil exacted a cruel and unusual punishment on every man, woman and child by summarily ordering them out of the pueblo in eastern Andalucía. Given no time to prepare, the 250 villagers fled on mules or on foot, leaving their belongings behind. Already poor and struggling to survive, many had nowhere to go.
Their alleged crime? To have given food, sometimes money, occasionally shelter, to hungry and desperate guerrillas – including local men and about 20 from the next village of Frigiliana, five miles away – who had taken to the sierras above El Acebuchal to fight Franco’s fascist regime after the civil war, which ended in 1939.
As tens of thousands of British holidaymakers bask in the sun amid record-breaking temperatures, most have little inkling of the tragic and bloody drama, mostly unreported at the time, that played out within living memory so close to where they are, leaving indelible scars on the people, the villages and the landscape.
Three-quarters of a century after the trauma in El Acebuchal, the precise date of which is lost, most of those people are dead. But on another broiling day, Baldamero Torres Sánchez, 68, a retired builder and bar owner from Frigiliana, has come to the village – whose name means “the wild olive tree” – to tell his family’s story.
His brother Aurelio was only two years old when his father, Baldomero Torres Avila, then 35, and his mother, Concha, 32, were forced out. They were among the fortunate ones who found a place to stay, in the town of Cómpeta, seven miles over the mountains. Many others drifted away, to Málaga and across Spain.
Aurelio, a retired electrician, and one of the last to be born in the village, died, aged 77, at the end of June, taking his memories with him. His father scratched a living as a muleteer, on the ancient trading route between Nerja and Granada that passed through El Acebuchal, and by picking olives and esparto grass; his mother ran a small bar.
“My father was very, very angry when they were thrown out, although he didn’t say so. He kept his anger inside the family,” said Torres. Showing dissent in public was dangerous. “People kept their mouths shut.”
Ironically, he had fought for Franco’s nationalists during the civil war and now he was being victimised. “Yes, he was on Franco’s side, and he continued to support him,” said Torres, “but it was complicated.” Not least in the family home, with his mother on the other side as a committed republican.
His father had already felt the force of the Guardia Civil, having been harassed and beaten, like many of the young men who then joined la gente de la sierra – “the people of the mountains”.
“He knew there were bad people and good people in the Guardia Civil,” said Torres. Equally, he had friends from childhood among the rebels, also known as the Maquis, after the French Resistance guerrillas. “And he didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. So when they came to the door, usually in the middle of the night, we gave them food. But my father knew there were bad people in the mountains too.”
This was brought home on 10 June 1947 when a family friend, Antonio Ortiz Torres, believed to be in his thirties, was murdered by the guerrillas. “They ordered him, at gunpoint, to hand over 100,000 pesetas,” said Torres. “That was a lot of money – about €6,000 today – and he didn’t have it. So they took him up to a piece of level ground, 300m above the village, and shot him. It was terrible.”
On the edge of the village, Torres led the Observer into a wood, dotted with pink oleander, where Ortiz is buried under a tree, his grave marked by a small stone block and iron cross. “He was a good man; he didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Ortiz was the last man killed in the village before the clearance. His death came during a year of great tension, fear and suspicion. The area officially became a war zone and the Franco regime was increasingly paranoid about the communist-led insurgency, which began in 1944, five years after the civil war ended.
“Unfortunately, the people of El Acebuchal found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the British writer and journalist David Baird, whose critically acclaimed book Between Two Fires (2008) is the definitive account of the war here.
The war ended dramatically on 20 January 1952 when the last guerrilla, Antonio Sánchez Martin, was gunned down by the Guardia Civil at his farmhouse above Frigiliana in front of his two young daughters. Those who witnessed the spectacle that followed will never forget it. Hundreds of people out celebrating San Sebastián’s day could only watch in horror as the Guardia Civil triumphantly paraded his body, sprawled face down across a mule, blood dripping, along the narrow main street.
Thereafter, a trickle of people returned to El Acebuchal to reclaim their homes and their lives. But most of the village, without running water or electricity until 2003, went to rack and ruin until nearly the end of the century.
Today, it is transformed: nearly all the houses, with their bright coloured doors, are restored.
Only a handful of people live here now but the village is on tourist maps for hikers and cyclists. Those maps misleadingly label it “the lost village”.
“What happened in Acebuchal was very sad,” said Torres, outside the family house-cum-school that his grandfather, Antonio el Obispo, built in the 1910s and which he has restored. “Nothing will happen here in my lifetime,” he said. But he hopes that, one day, his grandchildren will take it over and cherish this lovely, peaceful place.
