From tomorrow Wednesday to next March 25, Casa Árabe de Madrid exhibits Exodus and wind: Spanish exile in the Maghreb,an initiative of Casa Árabe and the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, commisioned by José Miguel Santacreu Soler as scientific curator and Juan Valbuena as visual curator. Free entry until capacity is complete. In Spanish.
The exhibition offers a historical and emotional journey into Spanish exile in North Africa. An exile the size of a sea. Not just any sea but ours, the Mediterranean. An exile in four movements: fear, indignation, hope and resignation.
It is estimated that some 13,000 Spaniards arrived in North Africa in March 1939, at the end of the Civil War. They left the last airfields and ports of the Republic in planes and ships of various sizes. Another 4,000 people were subsequently deported to Algeria from the concentration camps in France.
In 1945, however, it is estimated that only about 8,000 people remained in the Maghreb after half of those who arrived in Tunisia had returned to Spain, enlisted with the allied forces, were taken to the USSR, were shipped to America and died in concentration camps. At the end of the independence process in the region, in 1962, it is estimated that only 2,000 exiles remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and their number was decreasing in a slow trickle of returns and deaths.
This exhibition aims to show the experience of thousands of people who had to leave Spain at the end of the Civil War and found refuge on the other side of the sea, in the Maghreb region (in the former territories of colonial France, today Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco).
