On This Day in the Spanish Civil War; 15 September 1936, including El Casar de Escalona, Toledo

Serranía de Ronda today, via Wikimedia Commons

Málaga, Andalucía

By mid-September 1936, the focus of the Spanish Civil War in southern Andalucía shifted drastically to the rugged, high-altitude terrain of the Serranía de Ronda. Having already secured major urban hubs like Seville and much of the western coastline, General Francisco Franco’s rebel forces enacted a swift, multi-pronged campaign designed to crush Republican resistance in the mountain strongholds. In a matter of four days, a sequence of rapid military occupations shattered the regional Republican front, triggering one of the earliest localised humanitarian crises and waves of systematic political repression of the war.

The decisive blow to the region’s defence began on 15 September 1936, when Nationalist columns launched a coordinated assault to seize the vital peripheral gateways protecting the mountains. In rapid succession, Nationalist troops occupied the strategic towns of Peñarrubia, Cuevas del Becerro, and Teba, executing a deliberate tactical choking mechanism. By seizing these three specific municipalities, Nationalist forces effectively cleared the principal northern and north-western approaches to the plateau. The captures completely isolated the Republican forces stationed inside Ronda, severing their primary supply lines and communication links with the broader Republican-held territory. [1, 2]

With the perimeter systematically dismantled, the primary assault on the regional capital followed immediately. On 16 September, Nationalist forces under the command of General José Enrique Varela advanced into Ronda. The entry was preceded by heavy artillery bombardment, which gave way to fierce, chaotic street fighting as localised Republican militias attempted to hold the historic town. Outmanoeuvred and facing superior firepower, the remaining Republican militias withdrew from the cliffs, allowing Varela’s troops to establish full operational control. Due to its strategic geography, Ronda was instantly transformed into the dominant Nationalist base for all subsequent military operations across the Serranía. Two days later, on 18 September, the occupation of nearby Arriate extended Nationalist control further to the east of Ronda, cementing a solid front line.

The psychological impact of the military advance and the preceding aerial bombardments caused immediate panic among the local population. Recognizing the impending danger, a large-scale civilian flight began before and during the physical takeover of Ronda. Thousands of everyday citizens, municipal workers, and families abandoned their homes, embarking on a treacherous journey through the mountains toward Republican-held Málaga. This mass displacement placed an immense humanitarian burden on Málaga city, severely straining its limited food, housing, and medical infrastructure.

For those who could not or did not flee, the arrival of the Nationalist forces marked the beginning of a dark, institutionalised purge targeting anyone deemed sympathetic to the Second Spanish Republic. This campaign of terror left physical scars that modern forensic archaeologists are still uncovering. In Teba, the campaign of political cleansing began the very day the town fell on 15 September. Modern exhumations of the town’s cemetery mass grave successfully recovered 151 bodies.

In Ronda, the arrival of Varela’s forces triggered immediate arrests and executions targeting trade unionists, left-wing municipal officials, and suspected Republican loyalists. Historians have documented four mass graves within Ronda’s cemetery containing an estimated 425 victims. Of these, 203 deaths have been explicitly identified as belonging to the brutal initial wave of repression that stretched from September 1936 into March 1937.

Benamahoma, Cadiz today, via andalucia.com

Cadiz, Andalucía

In Cádiz province, even before the final towns fell to Nationalist forces, the civilian population in areas already under pressure experienced a severe escalation of paramilitary violence. Throughout August and into mid-September 1936, Nationalist repression intensified drastically in the village of Benamahoma. The assault was driven by Los Leones de Rota (the Lions of Rota), a brutal Falangist squadron commanded by Fernando Zamacola, a former prisoner and militant recruited by the coup leaders. Operating with complete impunity alongside local Civil Guard elements, Zamacola’s paramilitary group subjected the civilian population to widespread looting, physical violence, and systematic executions. By the time the occupation stabilized, over 50 people had been killed, setting a dark precedent for the rest of the mountain campaign.

The decisive military collapse of the Republican pocket in the mountains occurred rapidly over forty-eight hours. On 17 September 1936, a column commanded by Guardia Civil Lieutenant José Robles Alés marched into Villaluenga del Rosario, capturing an area where Republican control had successfully persisted since the initial July coup. On the exact same day, Nationalist troops occupied El Gastor, directly exploiting the tactical collapse of the neighboring Málaga front.

The following day, the remaining organized Republican municipalities in the north-eastern Sierra de Cádiz were completely liquidated. The Tercio Mora-Figueroa, a highly motivated Carlist and paramilitary unit supported by the Guardia Civil, pushed into Alcalá del Valle. Simultaneously, a parallel military operation secured the neighboring town of Setenil de las Bodegas.

As each town fell, military victory was instantly replaced by political cleansing. In Villaluenga del Rosario, the new authorities immediately initiated a wave of arrests, searches, and widespread property seizures, specifically targeting trade unionists, agrarian reformers, and labor activists who formed the backbone of the local Republic.

In Alcalá del Valle, the violence was immediate and lethal. On the day of occupation, 18 September, a patrol rounded up prisoners and marched them out to the El Baldío estate, where a group of local citizens, including the merchant Julio Pardillo Oliveira, were summarily shot. This initial bloodletting expanded into an intense, long-term purge that ultimately claimed the lives of at least 30 residents.

Forensics and historical records confirm multiple burial sites resulting from these mid-September days, including a mass grave within the Alcalá del Valle cemetery containing victims like Pardillo Oliveira, and the nearby Pareoro (Huerto Pernía) grave site, where Isabel González Linares and several others were interred after being executed. The terror extended deep into the surrounding wilderness. On 18 September, a Nationalist patrol scouring the countryside between Alcalá and Setenil discovered a group of 10 to 12 desperate Republican refugees hiding in the brush. They were captured and marched toward Torre Alháquime; in a rare moment of survival, the majority managed a daring escape during transit, evading what they and subsequent survivors believed was an impending mass execution.

By 20 September 1936, the geographical isolation of the Sierra de Cádiz was absolute. Through a combination of coordinated military columns and ruthless rearguard paramilitaries like the Leones de Rota, the Nationalist faction successfully crushed the mountain resistance, leaving behind fractured communities and hidden mass graves that would remain silenced for generations.

El Casar de Escalona, Toledo, New Castile

As the Nationalist Army of Africa advanced toward Madrid in the late summer of 1936, its progress along the Tagus valley was marked not only by fierce conventional combat but by immediate, devastating violence against the civilian rearguard. On 15 September 1936, this strategy of calculated brutality reached the town of El Casar de Escalona in the Toledo province. Following a brief but intense engagement, African colonial troops executed 11 identified civilians, providing a stark, localised example of what historians classify as terror en caliente, immediate, extrajudicial terror inflicted in the direct aftermath of battle. Multiple victims were shot directly inside their own living rooms or courtyards as troops moved house to house. Others were dragged into the street and executed immediately outside their front doors in full view of their families and neighbours.

The assault on El Casar de Escalona was spearheaded by the column of Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa, a ruthless commander within General Francisco Franco’s Army of Africa. Castejón’s force was notorious for its rapid velocity and heavy reliance on shock tactics designed to shatter Republican morale before the main army even arrived. Republican militias attempted to hold the town, but they were quickly outmanoeuvred by the battle-hardened legionnaires and colonial troops. Once Nationalist forces fought their way into the streets and broke the organised military resistance, the focus of the operation shifted instantly from combat to pacification through intimidation.

In El Casar de Escalona, this immediate violence served a dual tactical purpose. First, it rewarded the shock troops by allowing them total impunity in the immediate aftermath of a costly fight. Second, it weaponised terror, ensuring that the populations of neighbouring towns further up the road to Madrid would choose flight or immediate surrender rather than attempting to resist Castejón’s advancing columns.

El Casar de Escalona, via Juan Antonio Morales Gutierrez

Caceres, Extremadura

While General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces had successfully consolidated control over the vast majority of the province, their absolute authority dissolved in the rugged geography of the southeast. Between 10 and 20 September 1936, Cáceres transformed into a complex arena where institutionalised political repression in the western rearguard contrasted sharply with the emergence of an organised, heavily fortified Republican front line along the Toledo border.

Between 10 and 15 September, the nature of Nationalist violence in western and central Cáceres underwent a structural shift. The initial, chaotic wave of street-level violence was systematically replaced by an organised framework of mass detention and execution.

Provincial and municipal prisons rapidly filled to capacity with Republican municipal officials, prominent trade unionists, and left-wing activists who had been systematically rounded up during town sweeps. During this transition, the mechanics of the purge operated on two parallel tracks: informal, extrajudicial executions known as paseos (nighttime executions) continued unabated, while formal, state-sanctioned military tribunals (tribunales militares) were concurrently introduced to give the repression an veneer of legal bureaucracy.

Despite securing the provincial capital and the western plains, Nationalist forces hit a hard defensive wall on 16 September. The south-eastern and eastern fringes of the province remained an active, hostile frontier. Rather than subverting to the Nationalist rear guard, a substantial Republican-held pocket survived around Alía and the eastern Villuercas and Ibores zones. Geographically protected by dense forests and steep mountain passes, this pocket maintained an unbroken operational link directly to Republican-held territory in neighboring Toledo. By 16 to 20 September, a genuine, continuous front line developed through the mountains. The Republican strongholds of Alía, Guadalupe, Cañamero, Navatrasierra, and Villar del Pedroso stood in direct defiance of Nationalist territory to their immediate west and north.

As the mountain front crystallised, the nature of the Republican defence rapidly evolved. Between 16 and 20 September, the Guadalupe–Alía district saw a significant strengthening of Republican military organisation. The loose, fragmented workers’ militias that had originally held the hills were gradually reorganised into structured, disciplined military formations, successfully digging in to safeguard the vital highway corridors feeding into Toledo. This heavily defended pocket quickly became a critical sanctuary for the regional population. As the Nationalist “cold terror” intensified in the west, a massive concentration of civilian refugees flooded into the eastern mountains. Thousands of everyday citizens and families fleeing occupied municipalities sought shelter in Alía and Guadalupe, while thousands more used the secure mountain corridor to escape deeper into the Republican heartland of Toledo. For a crucial window in September 1936, this mountainous redoubt successfully halted the Nationalist advance, transforming a campaign of pacification into a prolonged war of attrition.

León, Old Castile

Nationalist repression in León province eventually claimed around 3,000 lives, though the exact total remains uncertain because many extrajudicial killings were incompletely recorded or never entered accurately in civil registers. Research by Secundino Serrano identified 1,018 people killed by shootings and paseos in León city alone, while his estimate for the province as a whole approached 3,000. Extrajudicial killings outnumbered executions resulting from military court sentences, and numerous isolated places around the province became regular killing grounds.

One of the most important was the monte de Villadangos, near Villadangos del Páramo, about 20km west of León city. Beginning in early September 1936, prisoners held by the Nationalists were brought into the area, shot, and buried locally. Many had passed through San Marcos in León, the former convent that the Nationalists converted into one of the province’s principal detention centres. Victims brought to Villadangos came from communities across León, including Mansilla de las Mulas, Valencia de Don Juan, Sahagún, Benavides de Órbigo, Valderas, Villaornate, Folgoso de la Ribera, León, Alija del Infantado and Villadangos itself.

The killings can be followed through September. On 10 September, four prisoners were killed at Villadangos. Another, larger group arrived on 14 September, when eight men from Alija de los Melones, the present-day Alija del Infantado, were killed. On 20 September, another seven prisoners were killed there. These were not three isolated incidents: contemporary records and later research show that Villadangos was being used repeatedly as an execution site, with new groups of Nationalist prisoners brought there at intervals throughout the autumn.

The prisoners were overwhelmingly people associated, or believed to be associated, with the Republican political and labour movement. They included municipal officials, Socialists, trade-union members, agricultural workers and other civilians detained after the Nationalists secured most of León. Some had spent days or weeks imprisoned before being removed. A paseo normally bypassed even the summary procedures of a Nationalist military court: prisoners were taken from detention, transported to an isolated place, killed, and frequently entered in local records with little or no information explaining who they were or why they had died. Villadangos was well suited to this system. The killing area lay outside León city but remained close enough for prisoners to be transported there from San Marcos and other detention centres. Civil registers from Villadangos and neighbouring municipalities subsequently recorded unidentified bodies, while local people became aware that prisoners were being brought into the area and killed. Similar sites operated around León at Valverde del Camino, San Isidro, Puente Castro, Campo de Fresno, and elsewhere in the province.

The 20 September group included prisoners connected with Valencia de Don Juan. Six men from that town had been arrested the previous day and taken through San Marcos before being transported to the Villadangos area, where they were killed at Pozo Melgar. Their case can be followed in much greater detail and belongs in a separate account, but it shows how the Villadangos killings worked in practice: arrest in a person’s home town, transfer into the Nationalist prison system in León, removal from detention, and death at an isolated rural site. The executions continued after September and approximately 85 Republican sympathisers are now specifically associated with the Villadangos killings, with at least 71 believed to have been placed in the common grave at the cemetery of San Juan de Villadangos and another group associated with a grave at nearby Fojedo del Páramo.

Archaeological work eventually began at Villadangos cemetery in 2022. Excavators found human remains in the central part of the cemetery, though later tombs and pantheons constructed over parts of the burial area prevented the entire suspected grave from being excavated. The investigation confirmed what local testimony and documentary research had long recorded: during the autumn of 1936, Villadangos had served not as the site of a battle but as one of the principal places to which the Nationalist authorities and their supporters brought prisoners from across León to be killed.

Salamanca, Old Castile

Nationalist repression in Salamanca province ultimately caused at least 1,124 documented deaths, though researchers regard the total as still incomplete. Of these, 154 people were executed after death sentences imposed by Nationalist military courts. This means that roughly 970 others were killed outside the formal court-martial execution system, through sacas, roadside shootings, disappearances after detention, and other extrajudicial killings.

By September, the Prisión Provincial de Salamanca was severely overcrowded. The prison had been built for only about 120 prisoners, but mass arrests after the uprising eventually pushed its population towards roughly ten times that capacity. Political prisoners included Republican municipal officials, Socialists, trade unionists, teachers, agricultural workers, police officers who were considered politically unreliable, and others accused of supporting or defending the Republic. At least eight military investigating courts were operating in Salamanca, with cases heard in the infantry and cavalry barracks. Those condemned to death were normally taken at dawn to the Campo del Marín, close to Salamanca cemetery, where they were shot. Over the entire repression, 154 people were executed in Salamanca after court-martial sentences, the first on 17 August 1936 and the last in February 1940.

Two teachers were executed on 19 September. Alberto Sánchez Lorenzo, about forty-one, was a national-school teacher from Masueco who was working at Garcihernández. Octavio Rivas García, also a teacher, was executed the same day. Their deaths formed part of a much wider repression of Salamanca’s teaching profession: later research has identified nearly 250 of the province’s approximately 1,200 teachers as suffering some form of repression, including detention, dismissal, imprisonment, fines, professional disqualification, or death.

By the end of the repression, at least 1,124 people had been killed in Salamanca province. Only 154 had gone through the process of receiving a death sentence from a military court. The much larger remainder were killed through extrajudicial repression, making the prison sacas, roadside killings, and disappearances of 1936 central to the province’s overall death toll rather than a minor counterpart to formal military justice.

By September 1936, the Nationalist takeover had substantially changed working life across rural Salamanca province. The Casas del Pueblo, Socialist agricultural societies, and other independent left-wing labour organisations that had represented agricultural workers during the Republic had been closed or suppressed. Their disappearance removed organisations through which labourers had previously negotiated wages, organised strikes, and pressed for access to land and employment.

This was particularly important in Salamanca, where agriculture dominated much of the provincial economy and disputes between landowners and landless or poorly paid agricultural labourers had been a major political issue during the Republic. Republican labour legislation and agrarian reform had strengthened workers’ ability to challenge traditional hiring practices, while Socialist rural organisations had organised strikes and campaigns over wages, working conditions, and land.

After the military uprising, power shifted decisively back towards landowners, Nationalist-controlled municipalities, the Guardia Civil, and the new provincial authorities. Independent unions could no longer operate openly, strikes were prohibited, and the organisations through which rural workers had challenged employers were dismantled. Local authorities again exercised considerable influence over hiring, wages, and access to agricultural work.

Agricultural labourers who had been prominent in strikes, Socialist societies, Casas del Pueblo, or Republican land-reform campaigns were also among those most exposed to arrest and repression. In Salamanca’s villages, the political repression and the reconstruction of rural labour relations consequently happened together: the people who had organised workers during the Republic were being removed from local life at the same time as the organisations through which they had exercised that influence were being destroyed.

The site of the graves in Valle de Yerri today, via RTVE

Valle de Yerri/Deierri — Fosa de Ilkai (Ibiricu), Navarra

The Fosa de Ilkai, near Ibiricu de Yerri/Ibiriku Deierri, was an execution and burial site used during the Nationalist repression in Navarra in 1936. It lies beside the NA-120 road between Estella-Lizarra and Beasain, in the area crossed by the Ilkai stream. The site is one of several documented execution graves in the Valle de Yerri. The victims were people who had been detained during the repression and subsequently taken into the countryside to be murdered. The available research indicates that the grave contained victims from outside the immediate locality. Among them was Amada Morentín Roldán, a resident of Lodosa, whose remains were buried at Ilkai.

The Ilkai grave belongs to the wider pattern of Nationalist killings around Estella-Lizarra and the Valle de Yerri during the first months of the war. Several other execution sites existed within the same area, including Montalbán, Oiantxiki, the Muga Lorca–Lácar site, Lorca Txiki, Arantzadia, and Ormaberria. This mass grave has at least 10 victims and was closed on 15 September 1936, and in 1979, relatives privately exhumed the remains.

The Fosa de Ilkai is right beside the Robledal de Yerri, an execution site Vicente Lamberto Martínez and his 14-year-old daughter, Maravillas Lamberto Yoldi, were murdered exactly one month earlier on 15 August 1936. Vicente Lamberto was a 55-year-old agricultural labourer from Larraga and a UGT member. He was arrested by armed local men and taken towards the Yerri area. His daughter Maravillas, followed him because she wanted to find out what was happening to her father. Both were taken to the local town hall, where Maravillas was repeatedly raped in front of her father before being taken to the wooded area near the twelfth kilometre of the road and murdered. Vicente’s body was subsequently buried in a nearby huerta by a resident of Lezáun who discovered it; Maravillas’s body was found about a week later. Because of its condition, it was burned at the site. The grave has never been recovered.

A van carrying Falangists in Segovia is on its way to Valladolid, via EFE

Segovia, Old Castile

While Segovia province remained under Nationalist control, Segovians who had escaped into Republican-held territory began organising themselves in Madrid. Refugees and political activists gathered around the Centro Segoviano, which became a meeting and recruitment point for people from the province who wanted to support the Republic.

The organisation produced the Milicias Antifascistas Segovianas, with Alejandro González and Fernando Llorente involved in directing recruitment and military instruction. The volunteers included Segovians who could no longer safely return home after the Nationalist takeover, particularly men associated with Republican and left-wing organisations. By mid-September, the Segovian militia was ready to leave Madrid and entered combat on the Madrid–Talavera front, fighting on the Republican side against the Nationalist advance towards the capital.

The unit was formed and fought outside Segovia province, but its existence reflected the division created by the July uprising. Nationalist troops and militias controlled Segovia itself, while some of the province’s Republican supporters who had escaped were now regrouping in Madrid and taking up arms against them.

Soria, Old Castile

During September 1936, the countryside around Bayubas de Abajo and Puente Ullán, south-west of Soria city, was repeatedly used for the extrajudicial killing of prisoners held by the Nationalist authorities. The victims were civilians from towns across Soria province who had already been arrested; they were transported into this rural area in groups, shot, and buried near roads and tracks. At least four separate groups were killed there between 1 and 15 September.

On 1 September, 16 prisoners were taken to the Puente Ullán area and killed. They had come from several places, including Soria city, Almazán, Muriel, Vinuesa, and El Burgo de Osma, with some having been held in the prison at El Burgo de Osma. Among the identified dead was Miguel Ruiz de Pablo, an employee at a distillery who was connected with the Casa del Pueblo in Soria, the local centre for Socialist and organised labour activity.

The killing ground was used again on 4 September. Three prisoners associated with Berlanga de Duero were taken to a site recorded as La Choza–Puente Ullán and killed. The surviving material confirms the date, number, and origin of the prisoners, though their names cannot presently be established securely from the available records. A larger group followed on 9 September, at the Caseta del Tío Romero, beside the road near Bayubas de Abajo. Nine detainees had been transferred from Berlanga, supposedly to appear before judicial authorities. During the journey another man encountered on the road was also detained. One of the prisoners managed to escape but was subsequently recaptured and killed. The grave ultimately contained nine victims.

Those identified from this group include Marcelino Antón, Fernando Miguel, Demetrio Moreno, Felipe Núñez, Simón Núñez, Juan Ortego, Ángel Valdenebro, and a man remembered as Florencio ‘El Alpargatero’. The grave was later investigated archaeologically, confirming the presence of the nine people buried there. On 15 September, another ten prisoners, all residents of El Burgo de Osma, were driven into the same general area. At about 9 a.m., they were taken to a location beside the local road between Bayubas de Abajo and Tajueco, where they were shot without having been tried by a court martial.

The identified victims included Agustín Alonso Zuloaga, Elías Alonso, Sebastián Orofino, Manuel Andrés, Julián Torre, Manuel Acebeda Acón, and Miguel Arribas, together with other residents of El Burgo de Osma recorded during later investigation of the grave. Local people continued to know where the group had been buried, and their remains were exhumed in 1971. These four documented groups account for at least thirty-eight people killed between 1 and 15 September around Puente Ullán and Bayubas de Abajo – 16 on 1 September, three on 4 September, nine on 9 September, and ten on 15 September. The repeated journeys into the same small rural area show that it was being used as an established execution and burial zone for prisoners brought from several towns in Nationalist-controlled Soria.