Belchite: the Spanish town left in ruins as a warning

Belchite is a ruin with a purpose. The old town was destroyed in one of the fiercest battles of the Spanish Civil War, and instead of rebuilding it, the authorities left it exactly as the fighting had left it — a permanent, roofless memorial to what the war did to Spain. A new town was built beside it, and the two have stood side by side ever since.

The battle of Belchite

Belchite stands on a plain about forty kilometres southeast of Zaragoza. In the summer of 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Republican forces attacked the town, which was held by Franco’s Nationalists. The fighting lasted from late August to early September and reduced much of Belchite to rubble. The town changed hands, but the battle cost thousands of lives.

When the war ended in 1939, Franco’s government decided that the ruins of Belchite would be left as they were, and that a new town would be built nearby. The old town became a monument — a place to show what the war had done, and, in the hands of the victors, to make a political point about the conflict.

A town frozen in 1937

The old town was never cleared or rebuilt. Its churches, convents, houses and squares have stood open to the sky for more than eighty years, their walls pocked with shell and bullet damage. Because it was left untouched, Belchite is one of the best-preserved battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, and a place of enormous historical importance.

Visitors walk the ruined streets and look into the shells of buildings where people once lived. The Convent of San Agustín and the church of San Martín are among the most striking remains, their roofs gone and their stonework scarred. It is a place that is beautiful and terrible at the same time.

Memory and the movies

Belchite’s ruins have also found a second life on screen. The old town has appeared in films including Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and it draws visitors from around the world who come to see the war made visible.

It belongs in this archive beside Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Goussainville — places kept as they were left, so that the past cannot be quietly forgotten. Belchite is not a ghost town because it was abandoned; it is a ghost town because it was preserved.

Frequently asked questions

Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Oradour-sur-Glane: the village that was never rebuilt — France
• Craco: the Italian hill town abandoned to the earth — Italy
• Goussainville-Vieux-Pays: the village under the flight path — France