Spain's ‘Hunger Years’. A lack of musealisation of a traumatic past

Abstract

During the infamous ‘hunger years’ (‘los años del hambre’, 1939–52), Spain suffered a long post-Civil War period of deprivation. Predominantly, as a consequence of the autarkic policies of the Francoist dictatorship, the economy stagnated, the country suffered a general shortage of food supplies, and living conditions worsened dramatically. Severe droughts in 1939–42 and 1946 exacerbated an already dire situation, resulting in more than 200,000 Spaniards dying from starvation, malnutrition, and disease. After the dictator's death in 1975, during Spain's transition to democracy, the cross-party ‘Pact of Forgetting’ prioritised reconciliation over justice, and no policies of memory recovery would be adopted for over three decades. Memory laws passed in 2007 and 2022 by Socialist-led administrations have begun to tackle Spain's tumultuous past, though the impact of famine and hunger years has yet to be expressly recognised by the state. This chapter evaluates the ways in which hunger and famine memory are manifest in the collective and cultural consciousness. It considers the reasons for the conspicuous lack of monuments that commemorate Spain's hunger years.