A list of over 5,000 art items seized by the Franco regime have been published by the Spanish government so they can be returned to their original owners’ ancestors. During the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939) that resulted in Francisco Franco’s fascist government ruling the country until his death in 1975, thousands of paintings, sculptures, jewellery and other precious items were seized by Franco’s Nationalist forces from political opponents. Many items were also lost in the chaos of the conflict or given as a gift to Franco’s government by his supporters.
This week, 88 years after the start of the Civil War, the Spanish government has compiled a 5,126 piece catalogue of all these objects so that they can be returned to their original owners or their descendants. In the early days of the Nationalist uprising in 1936, the governing Second Spanish Republic government created the Artistic Treasury Board, an institution designed to shield precious cultural assets from the inevitable looting that Franco’s military junta brought. These assets were stored in safe deposits.
As Franco’s troops increasingly took control of Spanish territory, the National Artistic Heritage Defence Service was created to ensure that these items would be returned to their original owners once the war was over. However, this never happened for many of the objects after the war, nor after 1975. Instead they were placed in institutions and museums across the country.
The list has been compiled f.