From time to time a stray hiker wandering about the ravines and crags of the Sierras Tejeda y Almijara nature park in southern Spain stumbles across splinters of human bone bleached by the sun. These forgotten fragments, and little else, exist as reminders of a pitiless war which many Spaniards were hardly aware of and which was ignored by the world beyonf the Pyrenees. More than half a century has passed since that conflict which destroyed and exiled whole families, most of the protagonists have passed on, and one by one the witnesses are disappearing.

By chance - its geographical position and the effects of particularly harsh repression - in the 1940's the village of Frigiliana in the Axarquia region of Málaga province found itself in the front line of that war to the death. From a community of just over 2000 inhabitants, 21 men fled to the mountains and joined a band led by Roberto, the nom de guerre of a legendary chief of the anti-Franco guerrilla movement.

Poor and isolated Frigiliana lived through an inferno, something hard to imagine when one looks at the village today.