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From revolution to our days.
The Restoration crisis and the
first republican experiences
The arrival of the 20th century meant the breakdown of the fragile balance
that had been achieved. In Portugal, the First Portuguese Republic had to face a
difficult international situation marked by the First World War and its economic
consequences, which ended up originating an authoritarian system in the decade
of the 20s, the Estado Novo (“New State”), which stayed with just a few changes
until the Carnation Revolution in 1974.
In Spain, the Second Republic also had to confront a difficult economic and
social situation. In June 1936, the uprising by General Franco put an end to this
regime and set the starting point of a long Civil War (1936-1939) that shook
the peninsular territory.
The Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was an internal dispute that confronted republicans
and Franco’s troops. It was also the scenery where the big sides of the time
faced each other, and it worked as a trial for what would later be the Second
World War. In this way, the role that Galicia played was not very relevant, since
Franco’s soldiers found barely any resistance there, and where there was some,
its duration and significance was limited (such as the case of the railwaymen in
Verín of the industrial workers in Ferrol).
Franco’s victory was quick in Galicia, and it obliged many republicans to seek for
refuge in the hills. At first they hoped that this would just be a temporary hideout.
They were the so-called maquis. For those they were unscrupulous bandits, for
others, freedom fighters. Was their cause legitimate or not, the existence of
these individuals lasted in time until almost the decade of the 60s. Their secrecy
makes it difficult to find remains that could have been produced by them, but
the Galician mountains keep a good part of the communication structures that
they used and also a similar geography, so it is easy to travel in time if we
go deep into them. Perhaps one of the easiest areas is the Monforte valley,
where the last Galician maqui was executed, and which has still nowadays a
whole network of formal communications, paths and roads that allowed the
crossing towards the neighbouring Ourense.
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