Pamplona Provincial Prison

The prison at San Roque

The prison stood in the San Juan district, on the site now occupied by the Parque de la Insumisión. Prisoners moved here on 28 September 1908 from the older prison at Plaza de San Francisco. The new building had 194 cells, four courtyards and three floors arranged around a square plan. It remained in use long after the Second World War.

The decision to replace the medieval prison on the Plaza de San Francisco was taken in 1900, when the money was finally found. Building took seven years under the architect Julián Arteaga. The report notes that correctional thinking of the day, including Bentham’s panopticon, reached Pamplona with the new building, although the plan adopted was square rather than radial. The prison also took prisoners from the district gaol at Estella, gave inmates access to a library, and allocated work according to a classification of prisoners as reliable, semi-reliable or dangerous. Women had their own section.

A prison on the frontier route

Pamplona’s place in this story followed from geography. The Guadalajara index to the Miranda admission files states that foreigners detained in Navarre arrived at the camp accompanied by the file and interrogation carried out at the Pamplona police station by the Cuerpo General de Policía. It describes roughly sixteen thousand people of some seventy nationalities held in civil and military prisons, Civil Guard posts, frontier commissions, reception camps, boarding houses and hotels before being moved under Civil Guard escort to Miranda. The prison was one link in that chain, and the police interrogation it mentions was carried out by a different body from the prison itself.

The presence of foreigners in the town was acknowledged in Francoist prison administration. The annual report of the Patronato de Redención de Penas for 1947, quoted in the Navarre study, singled out Pamplona because of its nearness to the Pyrenean frontier, said the town therefore had the largest number of foreigners under government supervision, and described them as people without a country or a home who were mostly fleeing prisoner-of-war camps. Relief work in Pamplona involved the local Patronato delegation, the charity secretariat of Catholic Action and a body for the assistance of foreign refugees known as OCARE.

A study of the physicians interned at Miranda de Ebro documents the same route a year earlier. Stanislaus Seidner, born in Czernowitz, a city that then belonged to Romania and after the Second World War became part of Soviet Ukraine, crossed the Pyrenees on foot on 18 November 1942. He was arrested six days later and sent to Pamplona prison, and on 16 December he was moved to Miranda de Ebro, where he was interned under the false identity Paul Alavouette.

Escape, assistance and onward transfer

The Ukrainian account begins at the foothill village of Orbaizeta, where the two men crossed out of occupied France in October 1943. The post commander answered their attempt to explain that they were Ukrainians by correcting them to Russians and proposing a toast to Stalin. They were then taken to Pamplona and shut in the provincial prison for several weeks. The memoir recalls implements for torture still fixed to the walls of the cell, and an official who smiled, observed that Ukraine had a great deal of wheat, and wrote Russian.

While detained, they received help through the International Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker relief body. A Mrs Moore from the American embassy in Madrid visited them, and they were sent thirty-five pesetas a week and extra food. The assistance did not change their classification: to the Spanish authorities they remained Russians and communists.

On the morning of 1 January 1944, at about six o’clock, an officer of the prison guard read out their names and told them to get ready. They were moved to a large cell holding a couple of dozen men, given back their belongings with anything valuable missing, tied together in pairs with chains or rope and marched to the railway station. The party numbered thirty-six, mostly French, with a Russian émigré from Belgium, a Canadian airman who had escaped the Germans and several Jews. Miranda is about eighty kilometres away, but they did not reach the camp gates until about two in the afternoon. The group’s total does not establish how many were Ukrainian.

A prison with several histories

The prison also held people caught in Spain’s Civil War and Francoist repression. The Navarre government’s memorial service records 1,536 people held on governors’ orders in 1936 alone, and the killing of prisoners taken out to Valcaldera, Ibero, Etxauri and El Perdón. Press reporting of the memorial site gives 7,364 people passing through the prison from 1936 onwards, of whom at least 425 were killed.

The government-commissioned historical report records that the prison direction claimed more than two thousand men in 1940, then 864 men and women in December 1940 and 392 in December 1945, after which the population fell away to between one and two hundred through the 1950s. Pamplona was classed as an ordinary-service prison within the Sixth Zone alongside Bilbao, Burgos, Logroño, San Sebastián, Soria and Vitoria. These are prison-wide figures, not counts of foreign refugees or Ukrainians, and they place the individual transit account within a much larger institution.

The site today

The building was demolished in 2012. The site became the Parque de la Insumisión in 2018, commemorating the later movement against compulsory military service. The former entrance received protected memorial status in 2020 and was reinstalled in 2023. The surviving doorway connects the present park with the prison’s different generations of detention.

The prison’s successor, the Centro Penitenciario de Pamplona, stands on the Santa Lucía hill near the San Jorge district, so the San Roque site carries none of the later prison’s history.