Seven years after Pollensa town hall notified the Council of Mallorca's heritage department of the possible discovery of a mass grave with human remains in the garden of a villa in Cala San Vicente, excavation work has begun in an attempt to locate some of the bodies in the garden.
Sources have confirmed that it has been “impossible” to intervene inside the property despite the fact that there are several witnesses who clearly indicate the location of human remains a few metres from the swimming pool.
The only search that has been carried out to date inside the estate took place in September 2020 and was very limited.
Experts had hoped to expand the area of interior intervention, but permissions were not obtained.
This latest intent is to confirm, as the construction worker claims, if there are human remains in the location, and in case of finding them, what is their origin.
The main hypothesis is that they may be the remains of Francoist prisoners used as slave labour in the construction of the Camí de Cala Barques between 1940 and 1942.
The Camí dels Pressos begins just a few metres from the location under investigation and ends in a network of tunnels in the mountain where the Francoist military authorities wanted to install a battery.
When the map of graves in Mallorca was drawn up, there was no indication of the existence of a possible grave in Cala San Vicente.
The situation changed in the spring of 2017 when a retired construction worker contacted Ultima Hora to confess that “while carrying out work on a villa in Cala San Vicentey ears ago, numerous human remains and clothing (shoes and belts, among others) had been found”.
The witness was very upset and dismayed. He assured that he had kept silent “for fear of reprisals” from the owner of the house who asked them (according to the witness’s version) to throw away the remains found during the excavation of the land to install the machinery for the swimming pool.
“We threw some of them away and reburied others,” he explained.
In 2017 a Porreres grave had already been exhumed, the images of which stirred the collective conscience. “I cannot continue with this burden,” said the witness.
The then mayor Miquel Àngel March (Junts Acançam) reported what had happened to the Council of Mallorca and initiated a series of enquiries at municipal level that succeeded in locating other workers who had witnessed the events during the construction of the swimming pool.
They all confirmed the veracity of the first testimony and pointed out to the experts the exact location of the incident.
To this day, all the hypotheses are still open, whether it is archaeological remains, a Francoist grave or even a crime.