Paseo de los Melancólicos, 2014

Paseo de los Melancólicos retraces the trail of Republicans that fled as the Spanish Civil War came to a close. Beginning in 1939 nearly 500,000 people escaped to nearby France through the Pyrenees, knowing they had little chance of integrating into Franco’s Spain. Fernández derives her practice from extant traces of this postwar exodus. On excursions through the mountains bordering Spain and France, Fernández has taken her own account of Linea P, the fortified line in the Pyrenees that Franco built during World War II to deter the Maquis guerillas and the prospect of an incursion by liberated France should his primary sponsor, Hitler, fail in Russia. Leading to Franco’s bunkers is a path that came to be called the Paseo de los Melancólicos. It began at the Canfranc International Railway Station, a 240-meter long building shared by border patrols of both Spain and France high up in the valley of Aragón. The now-abandoned structure was the gateway to the mountain trails that many used to es-cape after the war. Over the last few years, traversing these pathways has led the artist to collecting stories from exiles who never returned to Spain.