MADRID—Archaeologists excavating a mass grave from Spain’s 1936 to 1939 Civil War have found the naturally preserved brains of 45 people eight decades after they were shot and buried on a hillside in the northern province of Burgos.
Spain has hundreds of mass graves from the war and from ensuing decades of dictatorship under General Francisco Franco. Very few have been dug up due to a lack of funding and Spain’s “pact of forgetting” on its return to democracy in the 1970s.
The brains from some of the bodies in the La Pedraja grave were preserved by very specific environmental conditions after heavy rains seeped into bullet holes in their skulls. This “saponification” process turned them into a soap-like substance.
One of the 45 brains saponified of those killed by forces of the dictator Francisco Franco, found in 2010 in a mass grave around the area known as La Pedraja, is shown at a laboratory in Verin, Spain, June 8, 2017. Reuters/Juan Medina
