Estépar is a municipality located in the

province of Burgos The Province of Burgos is a province of northern Spain, in the northeastern part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is bordered by the provinces of Palencia, Cantabria, Vizcaya, Álava, La Rioja, Soria, Segovia, and Valladoli ...

, Castile and León, Spain. According to the 2004

census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses in ...

(

INE INE, Ine or ine may refer to: Institutions * Institut für Nukleare Entsorgung, a German nuclear research center * Instituto Nacional de Estadística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional de Estatística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional Elec ...

), the municipality had a population of 797 inhabitants.

Mass graves

Estépar is the site of multiple

mass grave A mass grave is a grave containing multiple human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. The United Nations has defined a criminal mass grave as a burial site containing three or more victims of execution, although an exact ...

s, discovered by the

Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica or ARMH in Spanish) is a Spanish organization that collects the oral and written testimonies about the White Terror of Francisco F ...

in 2014. Initial reports referred to the graves containing the remains of at least 70

republican Republican can refer to: Political ideology * An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law. ** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...

s who were killed by

nationalists Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...

in August–September 1936 during the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, link ...

Spanish Civil War - Mass grave - Estépar, Burgos

Identification of victims

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory make efforts to identify the bodies they exhume. However, by the time of the excavations at Estépar, the Spanish government under

Mariano Rajoy Mariano Rajoy Brey (; born 27 March 1955) is a Spanish politician who served as Prime Minister of Spain from 2011 to 2018, when a vote of no confidence ousted his government. On 5 June 2018, he announced his resignation as People's Party lead ...

did not give state support to such work, and the Association indicated that at this site the task of identification was going to be complex. In 2017 it was reported that some victims had been reburied in the cemetery of Estépar. Among the people believed to have been killed at Estépar who remain to be identified are the composer Antonio José Martínez Palacios and his brother.

References

Municipalities in the Province of Burgos {{Burgos-geo-stub