Word: cercedilla
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Like many towns that fell to the advancing forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the mountain resort village of Cercedilla (current pop. 4,000), 35 miles north of Madrid, suffered its share of Nationalist vengeance. Some Republican sympathizers were imprisoned and a few were shot, while many more fled to exile. One of those never accounted for was Protasio Montalvo, the Socialist mayor of Cercedilla during part of the war. For years villagers wondered whether he had died fighting on some distant front or had been a victim of mass executions after the war or perhaps...
...friends and young relatives tearfully embraced the frail old man last week hardly able to believe that he was still alive. Most of Cercedilla's villagers however, are too young to remember the war, and to them Montalvo's reappearance was strange and almost incomprehensible, part of a Spanish past they never knew. Said Mayor Enrique Espinosa, who was born a month after Montalvo's ordeal began: "I embraced him and told him we all are glad to have him back among us, and he just kept saying Gracias, gracias, gracias.' We will never know what...
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