La Retirada

Following an article on la Retirada, a P-O Life reader very kindly contacted us with photos and memories of a hike that they undertook back in 2017.

La Retirada : a photo reportage, by Nan Pederson

There is a place on the Spanish side of the old custom house on the randonnée piste from Cerbère to Portbou – where there’s a photo exhibition with the people waiting to escape to France through the Retirada 1939.

This is the old French Custom House

Continuing south, it’s shortly followed by the Spanish one  – you can still see the Spanish crown on it – at least one could in 2017, when these photos were taken.

A bloody monument has its place there

The following photos are on display at the Mémorial du camp d’Argelès-sur-Mer

Every day during the 1939 Retirada, approximately 10,000 people came through this one point of passage, the point closest to the Mediterranean Sea.

The exhibition closes with the famous words of John Donne (1624):

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.