"National Spain Invites you": Battlefield Tourism during the Spanish Civil War

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 5, 2005, Pages 1399-1426

  Holguín, Sandie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646454405     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.110.5.1399     Document Type: Review

References (172)

1. "National Spain Invites You to Visit the War Routes of Spain," 1938, Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
2. The War Route of the North tour would begin on May 1 from 1939 on. After the civil war ended, the War Routes became known as the Rutas Nationales de España (Spain's National Routes).
3. "National Spain Invites You to Visit the War Routes of Spain." The buses were, in fact, twenty American school buses bought from the Chrysler Corporation.
4. See Luis A. Bolín, Spain: The Vital Years (Philadelphia, 1967), 304;
5. see also "Copias de los telegramas cruzados entre la S.E.I.D.A. y la Chrysler Corporation," 1938, Caja/Legajo 28060, Sección Cultura, Archivo General de la Administración (hereafter AGA), Alcalá de Henares.
6. I have found no evidence of official organized tourism on the Republican front. Although the Republic did invite foreign visitors to survey conditions on the war front and home front, there was nothing as organized as what the Nationalists carried out after 1938.
7. This is different from, say, the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) during the U.S. Civil War, when civilians decided to watch the righting from the sidelines and then traveled back to their homes to sleep, or the Boer War, when Cook's Travel Agency organized excursions to the battlefields while the war was still occurring. The Spanish case was state-sponsored by an illegitimate government. That is, the Nationalists attempted a coup d'état on July 17-18, 1936. Their failure to attain power immediately led to protracted fighting that transformed into a civil war.
8. "National Spain Invites You to Visit the War Routes of Spain."
9. John B. Allcock, "International Tourism and the Appropriation of History in the Balkans," in Marie-Francoise Lanfant, John B. Allcock, and Edward M. Bruner, eds., International Tourism: Identity and Change (London, 1995), 109-110.
10. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999), 3, 25. A good example from Spain of Verdery's thesis on the symbolic richness of dead bodies is the fight between Republican exiles and the Franco regime over the interment of musical composer Manuel de Falla's body in 1946.
11. See Raanan Rein, "Introduction: A Political Funeral," History and Memory 14, no. 1/2 (2002): 5-12.
12. A. V. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism: Guided by the Dark," Journal of International Heritage Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 232-244;
13. cited in A. V. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism: Waterloo, 1815-1914," Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 (1999): 131.
14. As scholar Jozsef Borocz says, "The emergence of tourism ... presupposes... the transfer of a certain amount of surplus value to wages spent on such types of nonessential consumption as leisure travel ... [it] also presupposes that free time be regulated and packaged in weekly and annual blocks ... The standardization, normalization, and commercialization of free time is one of the most obvious outcomes of this struggle. Thus, industrial capitalism is a key factor in the emergence of the institution of leisure migration." Jozsef Borocz, "Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1992): 713.
15. The literature on battlefield tourism has grown significantly in recent years. A small sampling of some of the more recent works that cover the topic includes Modris Eksteins, "War, Memory, and the Modern: Pilgrimage and Tourism to the Western Front," in Douglas MacKarnan and Michael Mays, eds., World War I and the Cultures of Modernity (Jackson, Miss., 2000);
16. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London, 2000);
17. Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, Md., 2001);
18. David Wharton Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919-1939 (Oxford, 1998);
19. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism";
20. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1991);
21. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism";
22. Stuart Semmel, "Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo," Representations 9, no. 69 (2000): 9-37;
23. and J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1996). Although works on tourism sometimes differentiate between tourists and travelers, I prefer to focus instead on the Nationalist regime's desire to use the modern tourism industry as a way to legitimize Franco's rule and to create narratives about Spanish national identity. For theoretical discussions on tourists and travelers,
24. see Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001);
25. Rudy Koshar, "What Ought to Be Seen: Tourists' Guide books and National Identity in Modern Germany and Europe," Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 3 (1998): 323-340;
26. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism;
27. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1999);
28. Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism (Chichester, 1996);
29. and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, 1990; repr., 1999).
30. Thomas Cook began his first tour in July 1841 for Britons who wanted to attend a temperance meeting. The company began "organizing package tours to Switzerland (1863), Italy (1864), the USA (1866), Egypt (1869)," and Spain (1872). M. Barke and J. Towner, "Exploring the History of Leisure and Tourism in Spain," in M. Barke, J. Towner, and M. T. Newton, eds., Tourism in Spain: Critical Issues (Wallingford, 1996), 9;
31. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 15.
32. Borocz, "Travel-Capitalism";
33. Koshar, "What Ought to Be Seen."
34. Many articles in Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere, discuss the importance of tourism to national identity.
35. See also Allcock, "International Tourism and the Appropriation of History in the Balkans," for the ways in which tourism promoters try to solidify identities that are always being contested.
36. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 130.
37. See also Semmel, "Reading the Tangible Past."
38. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 133;
39. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 19;
40. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 138-139;
41. Semmel, "Reading the Tangible Past," 26-27.
42. The most famous destinations were the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in the U.S. Civil War (1862), various battles of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and the Boer War (1899-1902), where people picnicked amid slaughter. For a discussion of the emergence of battlefield tourism, see Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 20-21.
43. The ONT enlisted Pierre Chabert to visit the United States and Canada to learn how to entice North American tourists to France's shores. Chabert mistakenly believed that as many as 600,000-700,000 Americans would visit France right after the war, and that they would gravitate to the battlefields. See Harp, Marketing Michelin, 94-95.
44. Eksteins, "War, Memory, and the Modern," 153-154.
45. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 154;
46. Eksteins, "War, Memory, and the Modern," 157.
47. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism;
48. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism."
49. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism," 236-237, 238.
50. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism," ibid., 237.
51. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 7-8. Dean MacCannell makes this same point in The Tourist.
52. Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War (London, 1979).
53. Bolín, Spain, 302, 303. Bolín published this work in both English and Spanish in 1967, at the height of Spain's new tourist boom. Francie Cate-Arriés makes a compelling argument that Bolín's work functions (1) as a "kind of travel manual for foreigners" because of the way his recollection of the civil war is "suffused throughout with the friendly tones of a tourism brochure," and (2) as "one of several concurrently published 'official' texts that sought to commodity for sale to an English-speaking audience-and potentially future tourists-palatable images and acceptable messages regarding various facets of the Franco regime, including the Nationalist version of the Spanish Civil War." Cate-Arriés, "Frontline Tours and Memories of the Civil War: Luis Bolín's Spain: The Vital Years," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 24, no. 2 (2000): 265.
54. For the conditions facing foreign journalists and their attitudes toward Bolín, see Herbert Rutledge Southworth, Guernical Guernical A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History (Berkeley, Calif., 1977), 45-49;
55. Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War (London, 2001), 45-94;
56. and José-Mario Armero, España fue noticia: Corresponsales extranjeros en la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid, 1976). One person who faced Bolín's wrath was the writer Arthur Koestler: "Bolín and another officer held pistols on Koestler, while a third tied his hands behind his back with wire. Koestler was sentenced to death but then freed in a prisoner exchange."
57. Southworth, Guernica! Guernica!, 48.
58. For varying accounts of Bolín's role in propagating the story of the July 1936 Siege of the Alcázar in Toledo, see Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza y Gómez de Valugera and Luis Eugenio Togores Sánchez, El Alcázar de Toledo: Final de una polémica (Madrid, 1997);
59. Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (London, 1986), 66;
60. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1986), 156-157;
61. Southworth, Guernica! Guernica!, 46.
62. In terms of the Guernica myth, in accordance with which the Republicans bombed themselves to make the Nationalists look bad, Southworth meticulously documents Bolín's role in its creation and perpetuation in his monograph Guernica! Guernica!
63. Bolín, Spain, 302.
64. Ibid. The seaside resorts in northern Spain are discussed in John K. Walton and J. Smith, "The First Century of Beach Tourism in Spain: San Sebastian and the Playas del Norte from the 1830s to the 1930s," in Barke, Towner, and Newton, Tourism in Spain.
65. Bolín, Spain, 302, 303, 304.
66. Luis A. Bolín, "Proyecto para organizar la entrada en España de los turistas que visitarán la Ruta de Guerra del Norte a partir del proximo 1 de julio," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares. The New York Times
67. also mentions the financial benefits of the tours: "It is admitted in official circles here that the foreign exchange brought into the Nationalist treasury by the tourists will, of course, be much appreciated." William P. Carney, "Battlefield Tours Started in Spain," New York Times, July 3, 1938.
68. Luis A. Bolín, "Letter from Minister of Interior to D. Laureano de Armas Gourie," 1938, Caja/ Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
69. Harold Callender, "Rebel Spain Seeks Visits by Tourists," New York Times, April 28, 1938.
70. "Rebels Seek Tourist Guides," New York Times, May 22, 1938.
71. William P. Carney, talking about the tourist itinerary, says, "Then they will inspect Oviedo, Asturias' 'mountain capital,' a mere shell of its former self, but already being rebuilt by 2,000 war prisoners." Carney, "Battlefield Tours Started in Spain."
72. A series of mishaps and financial power struggles threatened to delay the start of the tours. The buses arrived only three days before the tours were to begin. In late April and early May of 1938, the Spanish auto import company managing the bus imports for the Nationalists-S.E.I.D.A.-negotiated and renegotiated the price for the buses from the Chrysler Corporation. Misunderstandings about the price of the buses, as well as about the Nationalists' bank credit limits, slowed down the importation of the buses and almost delayed the start of the tours for about two weeks.
73. See "Copias de los telegramas cruzados entre la S.E.I.D.A. y la Chrysler Corporation";
74. Bolín, Spain, 304.
75. Carney, "Battlefield Tours Started in Spain."
76. Bolín, Spain, 304.
77. "Los primeros turistas por la Ruta de Guerra del Norte," ABC, July 7, 1938.
78. Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism," 244.
79. Scholars of the Great War have tried to make distinctions between battlefield pilgrims and battlefield tourists, privileging the former over the latter, but as David Wharton Lloyd points out, the distinction between the two terms may be blurrier than one might imagine: "The language of the sacred and the act of pilgrimage both infused and were in conflict with battlefield tourism. The interaction between the two modes of travel was a product of the concurrent development of a tourism industry and the renewal of the practice of pilgrimage in the years prior to and after the war." Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 4.
80. In the same vein, Suzanne K. Kaufman, who studies religious pilgrimages, argues against the binary opposition of "tourist" and "pilgrim." She says, "Scholars of tourism need to move beyond an idealized view of Christian pilgrimage that depicts it as a premodern act immune to change. In fact, this definition of pilgrimage is itself a nineteenth-century creation. It emerged at the exact moment when pilgrimage and tourism were becoming indistinguishable." Kaufman, "Selling Lourdes: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and the Mass-Marketing of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France,"
81. in Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere, 80.
82. See also Eksteins, "War, Memory, and the Modern";
83. Harp, Marketing Michelin;
84. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers .
85. Scholars do not agree on how tourist sites become sacred, since many different factors contribute to the process, Certainly, not every tourist site is consciously consecrated. I am indebted to MacCannell, Seaton, Fine, Haskell, and Verdery for their analysis of sacred sites and sacred bodies. According to MacCannell, the five stages occur in this order: naming, framing and elevation, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction, and social reproduction. For a detailed explanation of those stages,
86. see MacCannell, The Tourist, 44-45.
87. A. V. Seaton has explored MacCannell's stages of sacralization in connection with his own work on Waterloo as a tourist destination and has concluded that only two of the five stages are necessary to sacralize a site: naming and mechanical reproduction. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 152-153. Fine and Haskell argue that oral commentaries during a tour also help to sacralize a site and can be an oral substitute for MacCannell's idea of framing and elevation. Elizabeth Fine and Jean Haskell, "Tour Guide Performance as Site Sacralization," Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1985): 73-95,
88. For the use of dead bodies as markers of sacred sites, see Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, esp. 44-53.
89. Of course, names are multivalent, and their sacred function can differ. Witness, for example, the different meanings of the Alamo among Anglos, Tejanos, and Mexicans.
90. "Autocares," in Archivo General de la Administración.
91. See Sección Cultura: Caja/Legajo 12026 (Alcalá de Henares, ca. 1939);
92. Bolín, Spain, 304. Interestingly enough, the use of conquered place names as political signifiers reappears with the words "Saarland," "Bohemia," and "Sudetenland" painted on armored vehicles used by the Danzig SS to attack the Polish post office in the disputed city on September 1, 1939.
93. See the early Nazi propaganda films Campaign in Poland, Baptism of Fire, and Victory in the West. For a discussion of these films,
94. see Thomas Sakmyster, "Nazi Documentaries of Intimidation: Feldzug in Polen (1940), Feuertaufe (1940) and Sieg im Westen (1941)," Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 16, no. 4 (1996): 485-515. A special thanks to Ray Canoy for alerting me to this reference.
95. Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 140-143. For the importance of tour guides for oral framing,
96. see Fine and Haskell, "Tour Guide Performance as Site Sacralization."
97. MacCannell, The Tourist, 45. Here is where MacCannell is at his most original, turning Walter Benjamin's thesis about mechanical reproduction on its head. Whereas Benjamin argues that an object's aura diminishes the more times it is mechanically reproduced, MacCannell contends that an object's mystique and desirability actually increase as a result of reproduction. For example, in MacCannell's model, Picasso's Guernica has gained its aura through reproductions in textbooks around the world.
98. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and with an intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968). It is possible to argue that mechanical reproduction serves both purposes-sacralization and commodification. The media attention given to "Ground Zero" in New York City produced both pilgrims and thanatourists, as witnessed by both solemn memorials for the dead and vendors selling "I Survived Sept. 11th" t-shirts.
99. For the idea of "preceding," see Seaton, "War and Thanatourism," 152.
100. Bolín, "Letter from Minister of Interior to D. Laureano de Armas Gourie."
101. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 27-28.
102. For the Nazi "concept of heroism as a form of national identity," and the relationship of Ypres to that identity, see Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), esp. xi-xii and 1-12.
103. Most historians agree that Spanish national identity was weak throughout the nineteenth and at least the first third of the twentieth century. For discussions of Spanish nationalism in this period, see Sandie Holguín, Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain (Madison, Wis., 2002);
104. José Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 2001);
105. Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875-1975 (Princeton, N.J., 1997);
106. Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith, eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Ideologies (Washington, D.C., 1996).
107. For a discussion of the culture wars and national identity during the Second Republic and the civil war, see Holguín, Creating Spaniards.
108. Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (New York, 2002), 46. Aguilar also adds, "This need to delegitimize the political adversary had been felt even before the war began, although it became stronger during the course of the war itself and even more intense during the postwar period."
109. Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, Ibid., 46.
110. Other works dealing with Francoist propaganda during and after the war include Gonzalo Santonja, De un ayer no tan lejano: Cultura y propaganda en la España de Franco durante la guerra y los primeros años del Nuevo Estado (Madrid, 1996),
111. and Herbert Rutledge Southworth, Conspiracy and the Spanish Civil War: The Brainwashing of Francisco Franco (London, 2002).
112. Luis A. Bolín, "Letter from Minister of Interior to D. Laureano de Armas Gourie." This brochure was the one originally sent out to travel agencies across Europe. As the tours grew, individual tourist agencies created their own brochures, which were decidedly less political than the ones disseminated by the National Spanish State Tourist Department.
113. "National Spain Invites You to Visit the War Routes of Spain."
114. For the symbolic appropriations of the Covadonga site in modern Spain, see Carolyn Boyd, "The Second Battle of Covadonga: The Politics of Commemoration in Modern Spain," History and Memory 14, no. 1/2 (2002): 37-64.
115. "National Spain Invites You to Visit the War Routes of Spain."
116. I call these documents "tour scripts" because they seem to be written instructions for what the guide should say. They also contain directions to the various sites. For the northern tour, I found guides for San Sebastian to Bilbao, Bilbao, Bilbao to Santander, and three versions for the "Iron Ring." I was aided by a report in the New York Times for the Irún section of the tour. For the southern tour, which was more sparsely represented in the archive, I found guides for Seville, from Ronda to Jerez de la Frontera, and for Cádiz.
117. "Ruta del Norte: Bilbao," 1938/1939, Caja/Legajo 12028, Seccion Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
118. Servicio Nacional del Turismo, "Ruta de Andalucia: Sevilla," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12025, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
119. See Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 285-286;
120. Michael Seidman, Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, Wis., 2002), 93;
121. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 308, 431 n. 1, 540.
122. "Ruta del Norte: De San Sebastián a Bilbao," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12028, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
123. "Itinerario turístico para el recorrido de la portión batida del Cinturón de Hierro de Bilbao," 1938/1939, Caja/Legajo 12028, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares. In fact, Republicans did disassemble art works when they acquired them. The Committee for the Requisition and Protection of Artistic Patrimony campaigned to save national cultural treasures.
124. See Holguín, Creating Spaniards, 170.
125. See logs from Servicio Nacional del Turismo, "Tour Log, September 9, 1938," Caja/Legajo 12030, Section Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares. Because the bridge between Cangas de Onis and Arriondas was destroyed, they could not go to Covadonga, and therefore the tour guides changed the itinerary. At each wooden bridge, the tourists got off the bus so that it would be as light as possible when it was driven across. See also Servicio Nacional del Turismo, "Tour Log, September 6, 1938," Caja/Legajo 12030, Section Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
126. Carney, "Battlefield Tours Started in Spain."
127. For a full discussion of Bolín's role in the Nationalists' campaign to blame the Republicans for bombing Guernica, see Southworth, Guernica! Guernica!
128. "Ruta del Norte: Bilbao."
129. "De San Sebastián a Bilbao." This myth is repeated in Bolín, Spain, 274-282.
130. Although it is not possible to determine exactly how many people actually participated in the tours (not all of the tour logs were saved), a small sampling of tour logs from the War Route of the North demonstrates that the numbers were respectable, especially when we consider that the war was still going on and that many Europeans were certain that another European-wide war was looming on the horizon. The logs report the following: July 10-19, 1938, Tuy-Santander, twenty passengers; September 6-15, 1938, Tuy-Santander-Tuy, four passengers; September 18-30, 1938, special tour of the pilgrims of Calahorra, fifty-three passengers; October 3-12, 1938, San Sebastián-Oviedo-San Sebastián, twenty-five passengers; October 11-19, Irún-Oviedo- Irún, four passengers. Servicio Nacional de Turismo, tour logs for July 10-19, September 6-15, September 18-30, October 3-12, October 11-19, 1938, Caja/Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
131. British Overseas and Continental Travel, "Northern Spain," 1939(?), Caja/Legajo 12034, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares; S. A. Chiari Sommariva, "Letter to Sr. Jefe del Servicio Nacional del Turismo, Castilla de Santa Catalina, Malaga," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
132. Luis A. Bolín, "Letter to José María Torroja," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12030, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares;
133. Bolín, Spain, 304;
134. Societa Anonima: Instituto Italiano e Propaganda Turisanda, "Letter to Bolín," Caja/Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares; Servicio Nacional del Turismo, "Tour Log, September 18-30, 1938," Caja/Legajo 12030, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
135. For Australian participation, see Servicio Nacional del Turismo, "Tour Log, October 11."
136. Bolín, Spain, 304.
137. Chiari Sommariva, "Letter to Sr. Jefe del Servicio Nacional del Turismo, Castilla de Santa Catalina, Malaga."
138. According to David Lloyd, "For most of the interwar period the average industrial wage for [British] men and boys was only £3 per week. A British Institute of Public Opinion Survey published in 1939 showed that only one-third of workers earning £4 per week or less could afford to go away at all ... As late as 1937 only four million workers out of a workforce of eighteen and a half million earning £250 per annum or less were entitled to paid holidays." Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 38.
139. See also John Stevenson, British Society, 1914-1945 (Harmondsworth, 1984), 122.
140. Rafael Jorro, "Letter to Luis Bolín," 1938, Caja/Legajo 12033, Sección Cultura, AGA, Alcalá de Henares.
141. Bolín said that "Spaniards, living in peace, wanted to know their country." Bolín, Spain, 306.
142. See Beatriz Correyero Ruiz, "Las Rutas de Guerra y los periodistas Portugueses," Historia y Comunicacion Social, no. 6 (2001): 123-134;
143. "Personalidades portuguesas en la Ruta de Guerra del Norte," ABC, July 12, 1938.
144. L. F. Auphan, "Diez días en el norte de España conquistado por Franco," L'Action Française, August 1, 1938;
145. George Ravon, "De los trágicos despojos del cura de Santillán al Martirio de Guernica," Le Figaro, July 28, 1938,
146. reproduced and translated in Armero, España fue noticia, 237-240;
147. A. J. Cummings, "In Franco Spain," News Chronicle, July 26, 1938;
148. Cummings, "In Franco Spain: I Have Seen Guernica," News Chronicle, July 29, 1938.
149. Cummings, "In Franco Spain."
150. Auphan, "Diez días en el norte de España conquistado por Franco," 13.
151. Cummings, "In Franco Spain."
152. Armero, España fue noticia, 240.
153. Auphan, "Diez dias en el norte de España conquistado por Franco," 21, 22-23.
154. Cummings, "In Franco Spain."
155. Bolín, Spain, 306.
156. Using the dates of the tours projected by the National Spanish Tourist Board, I calculated that there were around forty-two tours in 1938 and eighty-eight tours each year from 1939 to 1945. Using a low of two passengers per tour to a high of thirty per tour (each bus actually accommodated thirty-three passengers), I came to the numbers stated above.
157. Although Bolín is often unreliable in his interpretation of events, especially his interpretation of why the civil war took place, he is pretty reliable about more empirical data. For example, his discussions of the numbers of people on the specific tours from the Bishopric of Calahorra or the Congreso de Ciencias are verifiable from other archival sources. Because of this, I am taking his number of 7 million pesetas at face value. I am also willing to believe these figures because it is unlikely that he would have continued to offer these tours after the initial season if they had not been profitable. Bolín, Spain, 304-306.
158. Fernando Bayón Mariné, ed., 50 años del turismo español: Un análisis histórico y estructural (Madrid, 1999);
159. Rafael Esteve Secall and Rafael Fuentes, Economla, historia e instituciones del turismo en España (Madrid, 2000).
160. For a thorough recounting of how and why the Franco regime constructed these narratives in the post-civil war era, see Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia.
161. Even though the National Spanish Tourist Board privatized the battlefield tours after 1945, and although tourism tended to focus more on recreation and heritage after the 1950s, one could still find the ideology of these tours repackaged in the late 1960s. A group known as Le cercle historique et politique, in conjunction with General Tours of Paris, advertised a tour for October 4-17, 1968, titled "Spain of the Reconquest." This tour covered the former northern and southern routes of the Rutas de Guerra with the addition of visits to battle sites in Madrid, Barcelona, and Teruel. Despite the name of the tour, it did not cover the medieval Reconquista but rather the Spanish Civil War. Besides being able to eat dinner with members of the Falange in Madrid, tourists could visit Córdoba, the place "where Nationalists resisted fiercely for eight months." In Malaga, they would tour the city "famous for its massacre of Nationalists." So although a private French tour agency was responsible for organizing the tours to Spain for French tourists and history buffs, the agency uncritically used the rhetorical language and historical narratives created in the 1930s by the Nationalists. "Le cercle historique et politique et l'agence de voyages 'General Tours' vous proposent l'Espagne de la reconquête," 1968, Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
162. For a sampling of works that look at the relationship between thanatourism or heritage tourism and politics, history, and identity, see Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere;
163. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism;
164. Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin, Tex., 1997);
165. Koshar, "What Ought to Be Seen";
166. and Bertram M. Gordon, "Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II," Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 3 (1998): 616-638.
167. See Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia.
168. See also Michael Richards, "From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War," History and Memory 14, no. 1/2 (2002): 93-120, esp. 102 and 116 n. 34: "There was never any homage to Republican veterans even to the modest extent of that paid by the Spanish parliament to International Brigade veterans in November 1996 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of their arrival in Spain to aid the government."
169. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 112.
170. In fact, the last public statue of Franco in Madrid was taken down on March 17, 2005,
171. See http:// newswww.bbc.net.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4357373.stm for the latest chapter of this story.
172. As of this writing, there is discussion in Spain about using the Valley of the Fallen, the Franco regime's memorial to the Nationalist dead and Franco's burial place, as a "memorial to his victims," and as a "study and education center" to "explain to people the meaning of the dictatorship and its horrors." Elizabeth Nash, "Monument to Franco May Be Converted into Memorial to His Victims," The Independent, March 29, 2005.