The story of this place
In late August and early September 1937, Republican and Nationalist forces fought house to house through the Aragonese town of Belchite in a two-week battle of appalling intensity; artillery and street fighting reduced it to rubble and killed thousands. After the war Franco chose not to rebuild the shattered town but to leave it standing as a propaganda monument to 'Red' destruction, ordering a new Belchite built nearby by Republican prisoner labour. The skeletal old town—roofless churches, shell-pocked walls, a collapsing clock tower—still stands as an eerie open-air ruin, later used as a location for films by Terry Gilliam and others, its silence a lesson in the war's brutality.