Belchite

I’m afraid I have no idea how the Spanish pronounce this place but here we are. We spent a reasonably comfortable and quiet night off-grid on an aire de autocaravanas at Belchite. We had actually been off-grid once before on our summer trip this year when we stopped at a very pleasant brewery in Belgium. On that occasion, though, we didn’t stress the capabilities, just making morning tea. Here, our night was quiet – quiet, that is, except for the bin men who came to collect the basuras shortly after 02:00. Such is Spain.

From the Spanish civil war and the scourge of Franco, Belchite is now an historic collection of bombed building remains and rubble, which is retained as a memorial to the war. I have likened it to the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, wiped out by an SS attack on 10th June 1944. There are differences, though. Whereas Oradour-sur-Glane is meticulously maintained by teams of workers as a memorial to the martyrs who were murdered in the village by the Nazis, Belchite just seems to be left as it was after the bombing.

You can book a 90-minute guided tour inside the perimeter fence of the Belchite ruins but, for those wishing to be in control of their time more, it is possible just to wander around some of the fence and stare at the remains. We didn’t think we could cope with a 90-minute guided tour, most likely just in Spanish, so we chose the walk around the perimeter option.

I’m not sure why but Belchite had nothing like the same emotional impact on me that Oradour-sur-Glane did. Perhaps it’s because of the impersonal nature of air attacks versus the very deliberate cold-blooded murder of civilians being rounded up and executed. It could also be that I relate more to WWII because my parents were involved, than I do to a more distant Spanish civil war. At Oradour my eyes were almost constantly welling up. Here I didn’t have the same reaction but it must be said that I was outside the fence and inside there may have been similar heart-wrenching images hidden from view. When all said and done, many civilians still died.

There appeared to be two separate churches at Belchite which seemed to me to provide the most striking images, surrounded, as they are, by walls and rubble of peoples’ former homes. Of course, all war is rough but it is said that civil war is usually the worst.

Both the historic episodes described above targeted civilians in a way that my generation may find hard to imagine, being fortunate enough not to have lived through anything similar. We have more recently been getting an unpleasant flavour of such insanity with the situations in the Ukraine, Gaza and the Lebanon – and we think of ourselves as civilized?

With Belchite ticked off our list, our onward journey took us beyond Zaragoza to Haro at the heart of Rioja. Here we would wait out our final three nights prior to boarding our ferry home from Bilbao.