John Hopkins

His knees protesting as he gets to his feet, he calls over one of their volunteers, a local woman who believes that her grandfather, a Union activist executed by Franco's forces during the Civil War, is buried here.

He asks her to bring the camera so that he can document these latest finds.

Crouching down again, he takes detailed pictures of the skeleton they have just unearthed.

So far they have discovered six victims here.

This makes seven.

The archaeologist puts the camera to one side and picks up his brush once again.

He will not stop until every one of this grave's dark secrets has been brought into the light.

Nowadays, Spain is a popular tourist destination run by a democratically elected left-wing government.

Yet the memory of its recent, blood-soaked past lingers.

The story of Franco's rise to power and the painful, repressive regime he oversaw is fundamentally interlinked with that of the Spanish Civil War.

a brutal three-year conflict that laid bare the ideological divisions of interwar Europe.

It drew support from fascist governments across the continent and was a testing ground for many of the weapons and tactics later used to devastating effect during the Second World War.

But it also inspired socialists from around the world to fight for the democratic republican government and to oppose the rising tide of fascism wherever and however they could.

So what caused Spain's military to turn against the country's civilian government in 1936?

Why did a national civil war attract such international attention?

And what ramifications does the conflict still have in modern Spain?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noisa Podcast Network.

This is a short history of the Spanish Civil War.

The opening decades of the 20th century are a turbulent period for Spain.

In 1898, following a catastrophic military defeat at the hands of the United States, it loses its last remaining colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.