John Hopkins

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.

With its warfare mechanized in a way the world had not yet known was possible, it foreshadowed the horrors of the Second World War, with terrifying bombing campaigns unleashed against innocent populations, and civilians drawn into the conflict as much as frontline soldiers.

It prefigured the intense ideological contests between communism and fascism that marked much of the 20th century, and its cultural and symbolic impacts echo even today, almost a century later.

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It's Thursday, October the 28th, 2004.

In South Africa, the undulating plains of the Kalahari Desert stretch out beneath a pale sky, the ochre-colored earth and scrub brush warmed by the brilliant sunshine.

But in an isolated corner of the country's northern Cape province, this vast rolling expanse is suddenly interrupted, punctured by an enormous sinkhole, as if a titan's fist has punched through the landscape, leaving a deep, gaping wound in the ground.

The walls of the abyss plunge down towards a small, duckweed-covered pond below.

At first sight, there is nothing remarkable about it.

But beneath the surface, this pool opens up into a spectacular bell-shaped chamber, a submerged natural cathedral.

This is Bushman's Hole, one of the largest freshwater caves in the world.

Nobody is entirely sure how deep it may go.

No light or sound penetrates its depths.

It is an inhospitable alien place, a dead zone.