75 years on, Franco's cruel punishment still haunts village

Half an hour's drive uphill from the busy beaches of Nerja, on Spain's Costa del Sol, lies the isolated village of El Acebuchal, pretty but spookily quiet on a summer's morning. Seventy-five years ago, its people were victims of a grievous injustice.

- Mark Seacombe

In August 1948, Francisco Franco's Guardia Civil exacted a cruel and unusual punishment on every man, woman and child by summarily ordering them out of the pueblo in eastern Andalucía. Given no time to prepare, the 250 villagers fled on mules or on foot, leaving their belongings behind. Already poor and struggling to survive, many had nowhere to go.

Their alleged crime? To have given food, sometimes money, occasionally shelter, to hungry and desperate guerrillas - including local men and about 20 from the next village of Frigiliana, 8km away - who had taken to the sierras above El Acebuchal to fight Franco's fascist regime after the civil war, which ended in 1939.

Many holidaymakers on the coast will have little inkling of this tragic and bloody drama, mostly unreported at the time, which indelibly scarred the people, the villages and the landscape.

Three-quarters of a century later, Baldamero Torres Sánchez, 68, a retired builder and bar owner from Frigiliana, has come to the village whose name means "the wild olive tree" - to tell his family's story.