“My grandfather never stopped looking for his father.” It is narrated by Joana Vital, the granddaughter of Manuel Vital, the famous driver of Barcelona’s 47 bus line, whose battle to bring urban transportation to his neighborhood of Torre Baró in 1978 was made into a film. But this one, the one described in Marcel Barrena’s film, is not the only fight led by Vital.
The other begins in the fall of 1936, in the middle of the civil war, in Valencia de Alcántara (Cáceres). Diego Vital, accountant at the town hall, was assassinated by Franco’s troops, like many other residents of the city. His eldest son was Manuel Vital, then only a teenager, who at 13 “acquired a great responsibility because he had to lead the family,” explains his granddaughter.
“My grandfather talked about what happened because it was very important to him, it gave him a lot of strength and dignity to accomplish other things in his life, like the 1947 kidnapping “, explains Joana, who emphasizes that “leitmotifthe engine” of his grandfather’s life thought that one day he would be able to find his father.
The body of Diego Vital was thrown into the depths of the Terría mine with fifty men. But no one knew that. The families of the victims of reprisals, also punished, were subjected to silence and no one dared to speak. There were only rumors, like in so many other cities in Extremadura, where an estimated 13,500 people suffered from Franco’s repression.
“A great mosaic” of bones
A few years later, the family dispersed throughout Spain and only the mother remained in Valencia de Alcántara. Manuel Vital arrived in Barcelona in 1948 with the regret of not knowing where his father’s body was and with his watch, an object loaded with symbolism in the film. Her granddaughter says she started her own family in Barcelona but “never forgot her roots”, which is why, when creating the Association of Historical Memory of Extremadura, “ she started giving money.”
However, Vital died in 2010 and it was only in 2017 that the Provincial Delegation of Cáceres and the University of Extremadura began work on the Terría mine, after overcoming the initial refusal of the owners of the property to let the technicians in. In January 2018, the bodies of around fifty men were found 26 meters deep, covered by ten meters of water.
The identification work lasted many years, complicated by the state of the remains after so much time in contact with water. “They formed a large mosaic”, which had to be documented “bone by bone”, according to University of Extremadura professor Julián Chaves, director of the exhumation process.
A dozen bodies, unidentified
The results were presented last Friday, 88 years after the assassinations perpetrated by the Franco regime in Valencia de Alcántara. Among them were the remains of Diego Vital, the father of Manuel Vital, identified thanks to DNA provided by another of his children, who also could not learn “very exciting” news for the family, ” but life wanted that at some point they would meet and it was this year: on the one hand, the film about my grandfather and, on the other, the discovery of the remains of my great-grandfather were made public,” says Joana Vital.
Among the bodies found in the mine is also that of Amado Viera Amores, Republican mayor of Valencia de Alcántara. His daughter, Conchita Viera, has just turned 91 and is a symbol of the historical memory of Extremadura. But of the fifty bodies found in Terria, there are 12 which remain without name or first name to this day.
For the family of the driver of bus 47, a chapter in their story closes, but “it’s very hard and it’s a real shame that in your own country, after a civil war, this happens. It is difficult for us to clean up historical memory.”
