Viral video debunks claim that Franco built all of Spain's dams

Franco and the dams: the myth the regime never even needed

There is a foolproof way to tell a historical debate is serious: when someone shows up with a video dismantling a myth, and the myth turns out not to be exactly what people believed either. In Spain, the water policy of the Franco regime is that minefield where each side has its own figure and its own shame. A viral video by a creator who identifies herself as Elena Reines has lit the fuse again: "Franco did not build all the dams in Spain," she says, and from there the country splits between those who believe the dictator personally wielded the shovel and those who point out that most of those reservoirs had already been designed before 1939.

The discussion, which began as a Twitter thread with screenshots, has turned into something far more interesting: how much of what we attribute to a regime is the regime's own propaganda? Because Francoism did not need to invent the dams. It was enough to appropriate a policy that stretched back decades and put its own signature on it.

How many dams did Franco actually build?

The figure circulating in the material is stark: during the 36 years of dictatorship, between 1939 and 1975, Spain went from having around 60 major dams to more than 600. In other words, some 500 dams were built, with variations depending on the source, between 450 and 600. The figure is not made up: the regime used it as a showcase for its national water policy, an absolute priority from the end of the Civil War onwards.

Now, going from there to saying Franco built the dams is a leap that the regime's own propaganda deliberately blurred. Most of those reservoirs had already been designed before the war, some since the 19th century, and many were part of a hydroelectric development plan that the Republic had inherited from the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Francoism did not invent reservoir policy: it continued it, accelerated it and, above all, rebranded it.

What is true is that the mass construction of dams was a reality under Francoism. And that is where the detail many prefer not to look at comes in: the labour. Republican prisoners of war, along with some inmates convicted of common crimes, worked in conditions of semi-slavery building infrastructure. They were not slaves in the legal sense, but the sentence-reduction-through-labour system turned prisoners into forced workers who, in exchange for shorter sentences, built dams that the regime later presented as its own achievement.

The myth of the myth: when debunking becomes something else

Elena Reines's video does more than dismantle the personalistic attribution of the dams. It also introduces a nuance that has irritated friend and foe alike: most of those reservoirs were not built by Franco with his own hands, obviously, but neither were they built by enslaved Republicans as a gesture of generosity. They were built by prisoners. And the regime presented them as its own.

The reaction on social media has been a showcase of the best and worst of Spanish public debate. On one side, those who point out that water policy predates Franco and that attributing public works to him is as absurd as crediting Sánchez with laying the bricks of the houses he inaugurates. On the other, those who remind everyone that Francoism used dam construction as a tool of domestic and foreign propaganda, and that the figure of 500 dams has been repeated ad nauseam without context.

And in between, the eternal argument over whether the regime was a parenthesis or a continuity. Some claim Franco was a socialist infiltrated in the national front, while others reply that the war was won by those who now complain about having the memorial plaques removed. The irony writes itself.

The workforce that never appears in the photos

One of the most uncomfortable points in the debate is the question of who supplied the labour. Republican prisoners of war were used as forced labour in the construction of reservoirs, roads and other infrastructure. The sentence-reduction-through-labour system allowed prisoners to shorten their sentences in exchange for working on public projects. It was not formal slavery, but it looked a lot like it.

The argument over whether they were slaves or not is, in reality, a semantic debate that hides something simpler: the regime used the defeated to build the Spain it later presented as its great achievement. And it did so with a discourse that mixed the exaltation of public works with the idea that labour redeemed. Redeemed from what, is the question nobody wants to answer.

The dam as a national metaphor

Beyond the historical anecdote, the dam affair has served a larger purpose: gauging just how operational the official narrative still is. The idea that Franco built Spain is one of those half-truths repeated at family dinners and in early-morning tweets. And debunking it is not an exercise in revisionism, but in basic arithmetic.

The problem is that, in debunking it, some fall into the opposite error: denying that reservoirs were built under Francoism. They were. Many of them. And they were built, in large part, with prisoners. That does not make the regime more admirable, but more cynical. Because the propaganda was not about inventing public works, but about erasing the people who made them possible.

The discussion, like almost all those touching on historical memory, ends in a dead end. Some will say the video is a hoax because it exaggerates. Others, that the real hoax is believing Franco built anything. And meanwhile, the dams are still there, full or empty depending on the drought, with nobody remembering those who died building them.

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In the end, the unsettling figure is not how many dams were built, but how many of those attributed to the regime had already been designed before Franco came to power. The answer, according to the documents cited in the debate, is most of them. And that, more than a criticism of Francoism, is a warning about how history gets written: by repeating figures without asking who put them there.