Mallorca bombing memorial row: group demands 5,000 names

Mallorca’s planned bombing memorials have triggered a row over who gets remembered and how. Memòria de Mallorca said in Palma on Thursday, 3 September 2026, that the Balearic Government is pushing ahead without the technical commission for Democratic Memory. The group wants the commission to approve the plans and organisations representing victims to be involved.

It says the Government has not drawn up the regional memory plan required by law before proposing the monuments. Memòria de Mallorca also wants the plans to include victims of bombing by Francoist aviation and to avoid accounts that strip the events of their historical context.

A wider record of victims

The group says public memorials must not present war victims in isolation while making those who suffered repression invisible or diminishing their experience. Historical research, it said, records more than 2,300 people murdered and persecuted on Mallorca for political and ideological reasons. They did not die in combat or as a result of military action.

Memòria de Mallorca stressed that it does not oppose recognition for bombing victims. It describes them as victims of a war that followed a coup against the lawful government of the Second Republic.

It also accused the Government of contradicting itself after voting to repeal the Balearic Islands Law of Democratic Memory and Recognition while presenting the new proposals as democratic-memory policy.

Call for names on the memorials

Based on its research with experts, the association puts the bombing death toll at 5,000. It wants the commission for Democratic Memory to produce a named list including each victim’s name, age, municipality, date and place of death, plus other details that can help identify them.

Memòria de Mallorca has also called for a monument naming more than 4,000 civilian victims of bombardments carried out by the crew of the ship Baleares. It wants another monument, on Palma’s Passeig de Sagrera, to name more than 6,000 victims of Nationalist aviation operating from Mallorca along the mainland coast.

The group further demands that memory organisations are included in work on democratic memory and that policies follow current law.

Source: Europa Press / Mallorca.com