“The whole building smelled of filth. The dungeons in the courtyard were disgusting, there the prisoners were piled up on dirty mats, lying on the floor; those on the upper floor are a little more comfortable. You couldn’t be near the toilets because of their nauseating smell: toilets? Large rooms with a groove against the wall where the needy were lined up and in which water circulated. This is how Odón de Buen, considered the founder of Spanish oceanography, recounts his stay in prison. In the first decade of the 20th century he created the marine biology laboratory in Porto Pi (Palma), where he was surprised by the outbreak of the civil war.
Odón de Buen was violently persecuted by the Franco regime and arrested by the military rebels against the Republic. The outbreak of the Civil War surprised him in his laboratory in Palma, where he had settled a few days before, and after his arrest he was imprisoned in the provincial prison of the city, located in a former Capuchin convent. He was imprisoned there for about a year, but it was enough for him to discover the unsanitary conditions in which the prisoners lived. “I saw one of them die next to me, listening with intense pain to the delirium of his feverish mind,” he recounts in his memoirs. He was referring to Pedro Cañellas Sureda, a resident of the Majorcan municipality of Santa Maria, who entered the prison from the steamship Jaume I, where the prisoners were crammed together in the most precarious sanitary conditions.
As historian Margalida Roig Sureda explains in her book Diseases in the penitentiary centres of Majorca during the civil war and the post-war period (2024, Lleonard Muntaner), the terrible situation in which the prisoners found themselves led them to gradually fall ill. “The authorities had placed the prisoners in the holds of the ship. As the days went by, more and more men were crammed in; they were not adapted, they were very cramped, they did not even have mattresses to sleep on,” explains Roig. Without ventilation, without space, without the necessary conditions to clean themselves, they constituted the necessary cocktail for the spread and appearance of diseases.
The authorities had placed the prisoners in the holds of the ship. As the days went by, more and more men were crammed in; they were not suitable, they were very cramped, they did not even have mattresses to sleep on.
Margalida Roig Sureda
— Historian
“The spread of diseases was the order of the day”
“The spread of diseases was the order of the day,” says the Mallorcan historian, whose research focuses mainly on health care during the Civil War. In the case of the provincial prison in Palma, where Odón de Buen was held, the facility quickly filled up with political prisoners.
In July 1936, Manuel Goded, recently proclaimed military commander of the Balearic Islands, had declared a state of war in the islands and taken absolute control of Mallorca and Ibiza. From that moment on, a harsh repression was unleashed that had already been planned months before the conflict, as historian Bartomeu Garí points out: the repression was perfectly executed by the Falangists, the military, the civil authorities, the right-wing clientelist networks, the chaplains and the civil authorities. even by the relatives of the victims themselves. In this context, the concentration camps and the use of Francoist prisoners to build and house infrastructures in the interests of the putschists came into play.
It is not in vain that an official note published in the Mail from Mallorca On December 1, 1936, he warned: “The enemies of Spain will not remain in overcrowded and idle prisons. There are many roads to be built to allow this luxury. They have stolen a lot of gold to treat them with such finesse. In Mallorca, this is already beginning. With Palma as a strategic point in the development of the war by serving as a naval and air base for Franco’s troops, the authorities have begun to allow different spaces in the city – and the rest of the Balearic Islands – to be used as prisons and warehouses for prisoners.
An official note published in the Mallorca Post Office on December 1, 1936 warned: “The enemies of Spain will not remain in overcrowded and idle prisons. There are still many roads to be built to allow this luxury. They have stolen a lot of gold to treat them with such finesse. In Mallorca, it is already beginning
“If Spain became an immense prison, Majorca was doubly so because of its island status and the number of fields that marked its entire geography,” emphasizes historian Jaume Claret Miranda in the book’s prologue. Esclaus oblidats. The concentration camps of Majorcaby Maria Eugènia Jaume i Esteva (2019, Documenta Balear), one of the last works created around these detention centers.
Majorca, a place of “fear” and repression
The researcher points out that the island was a place where repression and fear were strongly applied in large sectors of society: “Public humiliations, deaths, imprisonments… Many people ended up being eliminated.” Those who were not assassinated, he points out, were locked up in prisons where they suffered all kinds of torture and others ended up in concentration camps: “They would be in charge of building the new state.”
As Roig Sureda explains, as the war progressed, the number of sick people increased, either directly due to the violence of the war, as in the case of the bombings, or due to the decline in hygiene and nutrition. In this context, the provincial hospital was the institution responsible for receiving sick prisoners, as José Tomás Monserrat points out in his book Doctors and society. Majorca, 1936-1944 (editorial El Tall) and collected by the historian. However, the lack of resources and institutional care weighed on the hospital, to which was added the purge suffered by the health service for which “many professionals were dismissed from their jobs and even sent to prison for their crimes related to republicanism.”
As the war progressed, the number of sick people increased, either directly because of the violence of the war, as in the case of bombing, or because of the decline in hygiene and nutrition.
In the provincial prison, Odón de Buen observed what was happening around him. The Royal Academy of History points out that, after being imprisoned by the military authorities, his son Sadí de Buen – a doctor and researcher who became head of the Spanish Antimalarial Service – was assassinated in Córdoba at the beginning of the war. weakened his morale and worsened his illness (he suffered from cataracts and severe diabetes). At the end of September 1963, he was diagnosed with “diabetes mellitus” and, in October of the same year, he was admitted by Antonio Espina, civil governor at the time of the coup d’état.
“Vagotonism” and neurasthenia
As Espina and Roig Sureda recount, Espina entered one night from the prison that had been set up in the Sant Carles battery “because he had attempted suicide”. “Unfortunately, the archives tell us that, although the episode of attempted suicide is true, it would not be the cause of his first admission in October 1936”, continues the historian: the diagnosis made that day was that of “vagotonism”, defined as a genetic disease of the vagus nerve.
A year later, both would still be detained and, back in the hospital, Espina would be diagnosed with “neurasthenia”. In the file, it was indicated that he should be sent to the asylum. Other inmates had to be treated for intestinal infections, closely linked to diet and with complications such as gastroenteritis or obstructions of the digestive system, for which the prescription was a change of diet that they could not obtain in the penitentiary centers. “The convicts on the diet complained of not being fed enough and even tried to circumvent the medical prescription by taking sweets, thus threatening their health”, Odón wrote in his memoirs.
Other prisoners had to be treated for intestinal infections, closely linked to diet and with complications such as gastroenteritis or obstructions of the digestive system, for which the prescription was a change of diet that they could not obtain in prison.
Can Mir, one of the most tragic and darkest prisons
Meanwhile, in mid-1936, a wooden warehouse located on the central avenue of Palma – from where the city began to expand after the demolition of the Renaissance walls that surrounded it until the beginning of the 20th century – became one of the darkest and most tragic prisons of Franco’s repression in Mallorca. Located on the very spot where the famous Augusta Theatre now stands – the Can Mir prison was accessed through the same entrance through which thousands of film lovers pass every year – it housed over 2,000 prisoners for five years, most of them linked to work associations and left-wing parties. The ship, approximately a thousand square metres in size, came to lock up at the same time, in a “nauseating atmosphere”, 1,004 prisoners “continuously circling around this den”, as recorded by one of the prisoners who remained behind bars, the musician. , writer and politician Lambert Juncosa.
Can Mir, close to the Sóller train station and the provincial prison, the latter housed in the Capuchin convent, became one of the darkest prisons on the island: having practically no contact with the outside, the prisoners lived together without any hygienic or sanitary conditions, in extreme cold in winter, with a permanent cloud of dust hanging over them, subjected to extreme psychological pressure and practically in the dark, because the bulbs around which the bats fluttered barely lit up and the windows located at the top did not allow light to shine through either.
In the case of Odón de Buen, after a year in prison and after various steps by the Government of the Republic, he was exchanged for the sister and daughter (Pilar) of General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his since childhood. He went to Barcelona, where he was appointed president of the Higher Council of Culture and, after the war, he resided for some time in the French town of Banyuls sur Mer, where on August 17, 1940 he began to write his memoirs.
