John Hopkins

Others advocate for a full surrender.

Still more want to continue fighting.

There is an attempted internal coup, triggering a brief civil war within the civil war, with supporters of different Republican factions fighting in the streets.

Ultimately though, all it achieves is a hastening of the collapse.

And in late March 1939, with Franco's forces encircling the city, the commanding officers in Madrid surrender.

Though estimates for the death toll vary widely, it is thought that up to half a million people have lost their lives in the three years of the conflict.

The regime to which Franco will now subject his country is authoritarian and cruel, especially in its early years.

Regional identities and languages such as those in Catalonia and the Basque region are repressed, as are trade unions and opposition political parties.

The Catholic Church once again becomes the state religion.

Divorce, contraception, abortion and homosexuality are forbidden.

Women are expected to serve six months in the women's section of the state party to prepare for motherhood.

Though the nature of the regime changes somewhat in the 1950s allowing a limited form of pluralism and economic freedom it is a dark time in Spain's history.

The country is only released from Franco's iron grip with his death in 1975 after which it transitions to democratic rule once again.

The work now begins of trying to heal this deeply scarred and divided nation.

To begin with, there is an official policy of forgetting, an attempt to repair divisions by putting all memories of the Civil War and the Francoist era behind them, and moving towards building a democratic future.

But the truth of the war refuses to stay buried.

In October 2019, the Spanish government finally wins a legal fight to exhume Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, a war memorial built using forced labor.

His tomb had become a site of pilgrimage for those with right-wing and fascist sympathies, and his reburial sparks a number of protests.

At the same time, the work to uncover the mass graves of those killed by Franco continues.

Though it tore apart the communities, towns and cities of a once proudly unified nation, the Spanish Civil War was never merely about the country within which it took place.