The map offers detailed information on each item and will be constantly updated.

The Regional Minister for the Environment and Territory, Miquel Mir, and the Regional Secretary for Productive Sectors and Democratic Memory, Jesús Jurado, this Thursday presented the democratic memory viewer, an interactive map that allows citizens to consult all the elements of memory through the viewer of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Balearic Islands (IDEIB), developed by the Cartographic and Geographic Institute of the archipelago.

Democratic memory of the Balearic Islands

Thus, in collaboration with the Directorate General of Democratic Memory, a viewer has been developed with elements such as the stones of memory, the trees of memory, the mass graves of people executed during the Civil War and Francoism and the roads built by prisoners of the dictatorship.

Mir highlighted the joint work carried out by the Cartographic and Geographic Institute and the Department of Democratic Memory “to offer the citizens of these islands open information so as not to forget one of the harshest episodes of contemporary history”. In this sense, the councillor stressed the importance “of being transparent and making accessible elements of memory that help to contextualise the repression of fascism”.

For his part, Jurado explained that “the map developed by the Cartographic Institute is a very useful tool for accessing information related to the graves, the sites of memory, the stolpersteine or the marking of infrastructures built with forced labour, with simple and open access to all, in our line of making democratic memory accessible to society. At the foot of the grave, in schools, at the UIB or on the internet, to promote memory is to promote democracy”.

In the IDEIB viewer, therefore, a geographic information layer has been created for each of the elements and these, together with the municipalities layer, are the ones that are shown in the viewer by default. The display of these layers can be activated or deactivated according to the consultation needs.

Each element is located on the cartography and has specific information associated with it: description, images and also downloadable reports. In the case of the stones, a distinction is made between victims of Francoism and Nazism, with each element showing a photograph of the stone and a brief biography of the person who was repressed. As for the graves, a distinction is made between exhumed, in the process of exhumation, viable or unviable. In the case of the trees, each one has a photograph and a brief explanation.

It is, therefore, an interactive, didactic and living tool that will be permanently updated with new advances in democratic memory and that, as the Fourth Plan of Graves and Democratic Memory of the Government of the Balearic Islands progresses, will incorporate new data such as the Map of Graves of Menorca, the spaces of memory, the air-raid shelters and other information derived from the different studies of Democratic Memory. The map can be consulted at ideib.caib.es/memoria/.