Spain’s culture ministry has published a list of more than 5,000 items plundered by the Franco regime – including paintings, sculptures, jewellery, furniture and religious ornaments – to help people reclaim their family property almost a century after it was taken for safekeeping following the outbreak of the civil war.
The inventory, which is part of the government’s efforts to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the conflict and the subsequent dictatorship, was posted online on Wednesday.
The majority of the 5,126 pieces on the list were originally gathered and put into protective storage by the Republican government after Franco’s military coup in July 1936 triggered the civil war. However, they were not returned to their owners when the conflict ended.
“During the early days of the military uprising, the Republican government created the Committee for the Requisition and Protection of Artistic Heritage, an institution dedicated to protecting cultural heritage items from looting and bombing by putting them into safe storage,” the ministry said on Wednesday.
“As the rebel troops gained ground, they set up the Service for the Defence of National Artistic Heritage, which was tasked with returning the works to their owners when the war was over.”
But when the war ended with Franco’s victory in April 1939, many of the pieces were seized and scattered among different museums, collections and institutions.
After trawling their collections, nine state-run museums – including the National Archaeological Museum, the National Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of America – came across pieces that had been requisitioned during the civil war or in its immediate aftermath. The culture ministry, meanwhile, identified one of the paintings in its own collection as being among the impounded works.
The ministry’s research also established that the National Museum of Decorative Arts held some pieces that were seized from the collection of the dealer and collector José Weissberger after the war ended.
The Francoist Service for the Defence of National Artistic Heritage seized the works from Weissberger’s home after he was accused of collaborating with the Republican government and being part of a masonic network. Although Weissberger was eventually cleared of all the charges, not all the works that had been provisionally deposited at the National Museum of Decorative Arts were returned to him.
Spain’s culture minister, Ernest Urtasun, said the list was about much more than his department fulfilling the obligations set out in the Democratic Memory law, which was approved by the senate in October 2022.
“We’re offering a space in which people can learn about our history,” he said. “We’re also opening the door to returning those pieces that can be identified to their rightful owners.”
The ministry said that applications for the return of the lost items would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
In her recently republished memoir, the late Spanish writer and anti-fascist activist María Teresa León described working with friends to save the treasures of the Prado from the bombs raining down on Madrid in the early months of the war.
“The exodus began under our sadly scared eyes,” she wrote. “We watched those extraordinary pictures move towards the light with a fear that was almost religious.”
Their fear only increased when they noticed, horror-struck, that the face of Velázquez’s The Buffoon Calabacillas had disappeared behind a layer of grey mould. Fortunately, an expert was on hand to allay their anxieties.
“We get a technical explanation: the painting’s got a cold,” she wrote. “Paintings cool down when they’re moved. Tiny fungi can cover the surface. A clean will do the job. I’ve never breathed out so deeply.”
The socialist-led government’s Democratic Memory law contains dozens of measures intended to help “settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past”.
Among them are the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves, a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime, and a “redefinition” of the Valley of the Fallen, the giant basilica and memorial where Franco lay for 44 years until his exhumation in 2019.
