On 24 February 1939, President Juan Negrin held a Council of Ministers and then left Madrid behind. He installed the seat of the presidency in a country house set deep in a dense pine forest, screened so thoroughly by the trees that it could not be seen from the nearby road, on the El Poblet estate in the municipal district of the Alicante town of Petrer. There the government remained from 25 February to 6 March 1939. It was barely fifteen kilometers from the airfield at Monovar. Negrin's chief ally moved with him: the leadership of the Communist Party of Spain set up its own headquarters not far away, near Elda, in a palm grove they codenamed Posicion Dakar. The Republic's command had, in effect, relocated to a quiet valley in the Levante interior.

The decision has puzzled historians ever since. Writing in 1976, Hugh Thomas pointed to the contradiction of placing the government's seat so far from the capital if Negrin genuinely meant to win the war, and he gave voice to the harshest reading, favored by Negrin's critics, that the remote location suggested an escape had already been foreseen. In 1999 Angel Bahamonde and Javier Cervera likewise called the move nearly inexplicable, noting that pulling away from Madrid only deepened Negrin's isolation and eroded support for the policy of continued resistance, a policy some of his own ministers were beginning to doubt. To leave the capital, in this view, was to signal that the fight was already lost.

A later reading is more sympathetic, and more human. In 2010, Angel Vinas and Fernando Hernandez Sanchez argued that the withdrawal to Posicion Yuste fit a change in Negrin's thinking. Once he understood the true military situation in the Center-South zone, his aim was no longer resistance at any cost in the hope that a wider war would break out in Europe. It was a staggered retreat, a fighting withdrawal toward the ports of the Levante that would let Republican forces fall back and evacuate, saving as many people as possible under the protection of the navy anchored at Cartagena. Negrin understood something with cold clarity: that Francisco Franco, once victorious, would show no mercy to the defeated. From that grim calculation, the hidden estate near Petrer, close to the coast and the sea lanes, made undeniable strategic sense.

Whatever Negrin intended, events overtook him. The government's stay at Posicion Yuste ended on 6 March 1939, and within weeks the war itself was over, the Republic swept away and the long reckoning Negrin had feared for the vanquished set in motion. What survives is the El Poblet estate on the outskirts of Petrer, its country house still standing among the pines, now recognized as a protected heritage site. It is an unassuming place for so heavy a memory: a quiet house in the woods where a dying republic spent its final days not dreaming of victory, but trying to spare its people the worst of the defeat that was already certain.