When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the town of Paterna remained loyal to the Second Spanish Republic. That loyalty carried a terrible cost. After the Nationalist victory in 1939, the new regime turned the town's cemetery into a place of reprisal. Between 1939 and 1956, its walls witnessed the killing of more than two thousand Republican prisoners — by one detailed count, at least 2,238 people. They were shot and buried in mass graves spread across the cemetery, in plots numbered roughly 65 to 135. So many were laid there that the ground earned grim names: El Terrer, and La Paredassa d'Espanya.

These were not soldiers falling in battle but civilians and captives, executed after the war was already lost. Ninety-four percent of the victims came from the Valencian Community itself — neighbours, in effect, killed close to home. Most were workers and farmers, town officials and trade unionists, the kind of local Republicans the regime hunted down across Spain in the years of the White Terror. Each of them had a family, and in most cases that family was never told where the body lay, or was too frightened to ask. For the survivors, the long decades of the dictatorship meant grief carried in silence — a wound the state insisted did not exist.

For a very long time, nothing marked the numbered graves but the cemetery's own registers. Through the dictatorship, and for years after it ended, Spain largely chose not to look at what lay in places like Paterna. The dead stayed where they had fallen, mingled together in the earth, while the country moved on without them. It was the descendants who refused to let the matter rest. In the twenty-first century, and with growing force after 2018, family associations organised around individual graves, demanding that the remains be recovered, that DNA records be kept, and that the state take responsibility for naming its dead.

The work of recovery is painstaking and slow. Archaeological and forensic teams have opened grave after grave, lifting commingled bones from pits that held dozens of people at once. One of them, Grave 94, became a symbol of the whole effort, its remains studied by DNA laboratories across years of analysis, the genetic profiles compared against samples given by living descendants. A single positive match can end a family's decades of not knowing. Researchers have catalogued the success and failure of these identifications across many of the Paterna graves — a scientific record of an intensely human search, in which a grandchild finally learns which fragments of bone are their grandfather's.

Today the site is no longer a place of silence but of remembrance. A formal memorial to the victims of Francoist repression has been established at the Paterna cemetery — among the most significant of its kind in Spain — and the wall that was once a killing ground now hosts commemorative ceremonies. Families come to read names that, for generations, could not be spoken in public. The Fosses de Paterna stand as one of the most important reminders in the country of the Civil War's long aftermath: proof of how much was buried, and of the patient, unglamorous determination it takes to recover it. And the work is not finished. Graves remain unopened, and families still give DNA samples in the hope that, one day, a name will be returned to them — that a set of remains long counted only as a number will finally be known again as someone's father, brother, or son.