Las Trece Rosas: The Execution of Thirteen Young Women in Madrid (1939)
In the predawn hours of August 5, 1939, thirteen young women—most of them teenagers or in their early twenties—were shot by a Francoist firing squad against the wall of Madrid's Cementerio del Este. Known ever since as Las Trece Rosas, or the Thirteen Roses, their deaths came just four months after the end of the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most enduring symbols of the brutal repression that followed Francisco Franco's victory.
Young Women of the JSU
The thirteen victims—Carmen Barrero Aguado, Martina Barroso García, Blanca Brisac Vázquez, Pilar Bueno Ibáñez, Julia Conesa Conesa, Adelina García Casillas, Elena Gil Olaya, Virtudes González García, Ana López Gallego, Joaquina López Laffite, Dionisia Manzanero Salas, Victoria Muñoz García, and Julia Vellisco Cuenca—ranged in age from just 18 to 29. Most belonged to the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth, or JSU), a movement formed in 1936 through the merger of socialist and communist youth organizations to resist the military uprising led by Franco. Some of the women had worked to support the Republican war effort, distributing aid or maintaining underground networks after Madrid's surrender to Nationalist forces on March 28, 1939. Franco had declared the Civil War officially over on April 1, 1939, but victory unleashed a sweeping campaign of arrests, trials, and executions against anyone associated with the defeated Republic. Communists, socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists faced imprisonment or death simply for their prior political affiliations. The young women arrested that summer were swept up in this dragnet, accused of trying to rebuild JSU cells in the capital during the chaotic weeks after the fighting ended, a charge the new regime treated as continued insurrection against the state.
Did You Know?
Julia Conesa, one of the youngest of the Thirteen Roses at just 19, wrote a final letter to her mother the night before her execution, asking, 'que mi nombre no se borre de la historia'—that her name not be erased from history. Nearly seven decades later, her wish was fulfilled when the story of the Thirteen Roses was told in a major Spanish feature film and became a national symbol of remembrance.
A Summary Trial and False Charges
The thirteen women were tried alongside dozens of men in a mass court-martial, a hallmark of Francoist justice in these months, where defendants received little more than a perfunctory hearing before military judges predetermined to convict. Prosecutors linked the group to the assassination of Isaac Gabaldón, a police commissioner killed in Madrid, even though historical investigation later showed that most of the accused had no real connection to that crime. The charge of "military rebellion" was applied broadly and vaguely, allowing authorities to sentence political opponents to death with minimal evidence. Legal defense was virtually nonexistent; sentences were handed down in bulk, and appeals for clemency were routinely ignored. This tribunal formed part of the broader "saca de agosto," a wave of executions in August 1939 that also claimed the lives of 43 young men tried in related proceedings. Together, these prosecutions reflected Franco's determination to eliminate any remnant of leftist organizing in the capital, using the machinery of military law to enforce political terror rather than pursue genuine justice for specific crimes.
Execution and Enduring Memory
Before dawn on August 5, 1939, guards led the thirteen women from Madrid's Ventas prison to the Cementerio del Este, now known as the Cementerio de la Almudena, where a firing squad carried out the sentences. Several of the women left final letters to their families, expressions of love and defiance smuggled out in the hours before their deaths. Julia Conesa, only 19 years old, wrote to her mother asking that her name not be erased from history—a plea that would prove prophetic. For decades under Franco's dictatorship, the story of Las Trece Rosas remained suppressed, discussed only in whispers among families and former Republicans. After Spain's transition to democracy following Franco's death in 1975, historians, journalists, and descendants worked to recover the women's names and stories, culminating in books, documentaries, and the 2007 feature film "Las 13 rosas," directed by Emilio Martínez-Lázaro. Today, a monument stands near the site of their execution, and their case remains a touchstone in Spain's ongoing reckoning with the legacy of the Civil War and the mass graves and hidden histories left in its wake.