By BRAIS LAMELA
Review by ZARA KARSCHAY

It is 1939. Spain is emerging bruised and broken from its Civil War as a plaything for Franco’s crushing rule. People are hungry. The country’s agriculture and rail networks are in shambles. Citizens go where the work is, leaving expanses of rural land unpopulated. Intending to reform Spain’s agrarian economy and redistribute the population across the country, the regime’s “New Colonization” policy (la nueva politica de colonización) draws up plans for several hundred new settlements to be built across the whole of Spain. Some move voluntarily, others are forced to do so, because their own villages are submerged to create water reservoirs. Over three decades, more than fifty-thousand people are displaced.