I have recently applied for Spanish citizenship through the Law of Democratic Memory: a reparatory scheme introduced in 2022 which grants passports to the grandchildren of those who were exiled under the Franco regime of 1939 to 1975. While waiting for the Spanish consulate to notify me of the success of my application, I travel to the Pyrenean mountains to retrace the steps of my grandfather, Ramón Martinez, who crossed by foot from Spain into France at the age of eighteen, and in doing so became exiled. As my grandfather rarely spoke about his journey over the Pyrenees, I’m not sure of the exact point along the border at which he crossed. The only things I know for sure are that he was good at orienteering through having been the Spanish equivalent of a Boy Scout and that he fled Barcelona with one of his brothers. They walked at night when they were less likely to be seen, and during the day they slept in empty ‘niches’, the coffin sized spaces in Spanish cemeteries used for interring bodies and ashes.

I don’t have a good sense of Ramon because he died when I was one. I was brought up knowing that his nickname was Giant, that he smoked several packets of cigarettes a day and that once on a camping trip my mother watched a mosquito bite into his arm and die while it was still attached to him. I know he raged about not being given enough divorce money by my wealthy English grandmother. I know that he could be petty and mean; that after he was finally allowed to return to Spain in the late fifties he tried to abduct both his children and take them there with him, luring my uncle into his new car (my mother, unimpressed, refused to get in) before being swallowed up over the border. My mother didn’t see her brother for years after that, and my uncle grew up Spanish. After the abduction, and because they had admonished him for it, my grandfather cut off his own Catalan parents and siblings and that contact was never reinstated: a self-imposed exile.

On the Catalan side of the border at Coll de la Manrella (I will use ‘Catalan’ now instead of Spanish, as that is how I believe most people living there would refer to it) I walk backwards and forwards over its invisible line in a strange dense fog. There are information boards with references to La Retirada: the exodus of Republicans that occurred during the frozen winter of 1939, when Barcelona was captured by the fascists at the end of the Civil War. [1] Retreating over the mountains and into France to escape internment or execution by Franco’s army, nearly half a million men, women and children walked straight into the start of World War Two.

I wonder if Ramón was part of this exodus. It feels pertinent to be the descendant of a massive movement of people, like I can stake more of a claim to my family history (and Spanish passport) if there is an official name for it. When I ask my mum if Ramón was part of La Retirada, however, she tells me that he left Barcelona two years before it took place, when all young men were called up to fight. Less romantic, perhaps, but as she points out, at this point Barcelona was seething with fear and treachery. The left-wing parties were at war with each other and it is possible that Ramón lived through "Los Dias de Mayo" where gun battles took place in the street and no one was safe. Whatever his reasoning, I recognise the not wanting to have anything to do with any of it. Perhaps if there is a genetic trait that I have inherited from him, it is that I would have tried my hardest to get out of there too.

***

On the first Sunday of March there is an ancient bear festival on the French side of the Catalan Pyrenees. We stay in an apartment that overlooks the town of Saint Laurent de Cerdans, surrounded by dark forested mountainous ridges. We hear the txoc-txoc-txoc of a song thrush and the noises people make when they haven’t seen each other for a long time. It is spring earlier here than back at home in Wales and violets appear delicately along the sides of the roads. We meet two older men wearing traditional black berets, sitting on a bench next to a fountain in the sun. I try speaking to them in my Duolingo-level Catalan (they look confused), then French (which I discover has lapsed) and then Spanish, where we find an understanding. I ask them if everybody here speaks Catalan, in the way that they do over the border. They tell me most people here spoke Catalan before the war, but after that they were taught ‘Be Clean; Speak French’. It is only in the very remote places, or over the border, that the language is strong. But if many have lost their language, they still have the Catalan culture: this is why the bear festival is important. I try to explain our reason for being in the area and one of the men says his father was from Barcelona too; part of La Retirada. Then we are cousins! I jest, and we embrace heartily. Your abuelo was anti-Francoista? asks the man, and in his eyes I understand that the man has lived much closer to the rawness of it all than I have, that it is not a joke to him, that it is important when I say creo que sí. [2] 

Soon we hear trumpets and horns bursting out half tunes, and the townspeople are crowding the narrow roads, moving upwards past the white cemetery towards a small church, where a plaque memorialises its temporary transformation into a hospital and place of refuge for those fleeing Spain. The bear appears suddenly as if from the woods above the church and for the rest of the day, chaos reigns.

It is a strange experience to watch the bear festival and not know for sure what the meaning is behind anything, as though I have some kind of cultural amnesia. The bear swaggers in his luscious furs and then cannonballs into the crowd. He is chased and captured, chased and captured by a gaggle of hunters with sticks. When he streaks past, the crowd boos; the sound of mock dismay follows him wherever he goes. He swats men to the ground like a petulant thug and pulls girls on top of him screaming. Two men in white butcher clothes with floured faces appear from behind us, smear blood sausage on our cheeks and cheerfully mock my accent. A yong woman in a purple tutu rubs us with a rancid vinegar-soaked fig. People’s cheeks are raked with charcoal streaks as though they have been swiped by a bear claw. There is a two-person spinning ghost thing and the stench of burning hair. A man dressed as a baby in a nappy pretends to hump the women who are thrown into his pram. A brass band plays contemporary pop tunes while the bear is caught in a circle of townspeople and made to dance on a chain: he prances and flosses and is suddenly lost to the crowd again.

The crowd at the bear festival moves within the memory of what it is performing, all the way back down to the town square. I feel how everybody wants the bear; how he is both desired and despised. I imagine what he represents has is to do with wildness and strength. Everyone loves to talk about the ‘earthiness’ of the Catalans (think of the little caganers - or ‘shitters’- that adorn nativity scenes at Christmas) and I wonder how much the festival’s unapologetic filthiness is a contrast to the command to: ‘Be Clean’. By the end of the day, layers of meat and fruit, flour and dirt are encrusted over the faces of everybody, young and old, local or not. And the town is not scared of its young people: this is all for them as much as it is for anybody else. No one tells them off when they fall over or play their reggaeton too loudly. It doesn’t matter if they urinate against the medieval walls or shout something over and over from a balcony at four in the morning, as if they are communicating with the teenagers of the past.

***

The Law of Democratic Memory is very different to the Pact of Forgetting, which was the unofficial policy that came about after Franco’s death in 1975. The idea was that in order to progress into a modern democracy, Spanish society needed to avoid directly confronting the atrocities of both the Civil War and the Francoist regime. Although the new law means that the government assumes responsibility for exhumation and identification of the tens of thousands of people executed and buried in mass graves, to this day, the 1977 Spanish Amnesty law means that no one has been prosecuted for Francoist human rights violations.

This collective ‘forgetting’ and lack of accountability has, according to many, contributed to the rising belief that an authoritarian system is preferable to democracy, with polls last year showing almost 40% of Spanish men aged between 18 and 34 planning to vote for the far-right Vox party. [3] Has, then, the Law of Democratic Memory come too late? What is the correct amount of remembering and forgetting that a society should do, and how soon after horror should it take place?

It is mostly through books and films that I have understood the utter catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Spain stood as an international symbol of (and proxy for) political division, but also consumed itself from within. Growing up, I glimpsed the darkness through the cracks: a family friend strimming the hedges one-handed, his other arm blown off at the elbow by the landmine he trod on when he was a boy. Stories of my godfather’s own father, minutes away from being executed and spared at the last second by a relative on the other side. I had no idea until I visited the Exile Museum in La Jonquera that two thousand Catalans were sent to Nazi concentration camps. There were losers and winners: out of politeness, my Spanish family and I do not talk about it.

***

A handful of brown bears lives in the Pyrenean mountains and has become the subject of fierce ongoing debate between ecologists and farmers. It’s interesting to think that dealing with apex predators would once have been commonplace and that what seems like allegory now is perhaps only allegory because we have lost so much of our lived experience of it. The day after the festival, back in Catalunya and hungover, I walk another stretch near the border where more refugees once fled into France. The path through the cork oaks - their bark stripped halfway up their trunks - is peaceful. Birds are singing, but it feels eery, thinking about the misery of the people who dragged themselves frozen and starving through these trees. I get trapped in a crowd of Catalan schoolchildren and their teachers, looking out of place tramping along the dirt roads. The Law of Democratic memory aims to ensure all secondary school students are taught about the dictatorship, and I wonder if they are here as part of the curriculum.

An old horse raises its head to watch me open and close the rusty old gate marking the border crossing point but I have no way of knowing whether or not my grandfather used it nearly a whole century ago. I wonder if being certain he was there would make me feel closer to him, and why it is that I feel the need to connect with a person who nobody seemed to like very much. Maybe I’m searching for some kind of historical explanation for his unpleasantness and its subsequent effect upon his descendants. Or maybe it is because Ramón exists as such a solitary figure in my mind; one who left few physical heirlooms other than the birth certificate I used to apply for my citizenship, written in a spidery hand that I cannot read. There is a photo of him with a clipboard, loading supplies into a van marked ‘International Commission for War Refugees’, part of his work to help set up refugee camps for people who fled Spain after him. There is also a letter he sent from Barcelona to my mum before he died, in which he writes, “Thank you very much for the photograph of Nicola. She looks fine.” I can’t fathom what he means by ‘fine’. Is there some unnatural genetic trait he was worried would resurface in his progeny? Or has the meaning of ‘fine’ simply been lost in translation?

I wonder if there are things that my grandfather and I both noticed in this Pyrenean forest, like the gorse in bright yellow flower, smelling of shampoo, or a farm dog in the valley below, barking at its own echo. Impossibly huge boulders which look as though they’ve fallen out of the sky, the song thrush still singing and the earth torn up in patches by wild boar.

***

At the end of the bear chase, in the town square with the crowd positioned around it, the children sit crossed-legged at the front and watch intently as a nimble hunter dances La Sardana in circles around the bear. The hunter’s voice cracks as he bellows out in Catalan all the terrible things the bear has done. We have heard it so many times now that for days we will sing and whistle in time to the trumpet tune played while the bear is mock shaved with an axe. His furs are pulled up over his head so everyone can see him standing there, exhausted and panting; just a man.

[1] There is a painful reimagining of La Retirada in Irene Solá’s novel When I Sing Mountains Dance, which also inspired my visit to the Catalan Bear Festival.

[2] I think so

[3]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/07/spain-young-voters-far-right-migration-housing-wages-employment-vox