When they arrived in the area in 2013, they found stones from the old houses of which the foundations still remained. In the following years, they rebuilt two more houses, cultivated a vegetable garden, and prepared a workspace to make handmade products to finance themselves or exchange for other products from inhabitants of nearby towns. “We do what the seasons give us: in summer, when there is a lot of fruit production, we make plum, fig, and tomato jams,” says Aracil.

“We pay, or we go to jail,” says Lalo Aracil, one of the convicted youths. Aracil and his colleagues, most of them from Madrid, began in 2013 to build a neo-rural life project in Fraguas, a small town in Guadalajara (Castilla-La Mancha) that was demolished in the 1960s by the Franco regime after expelling its population to replant pine trees. In the 90s, it was used by the Spanish Army for military practices.

Encouraged by the old inhabitants of Fraguas, who went to visit them, they have also tried to recover the original paved road of the town. “We have been able to recover it in some parts of the town, but in most of the town, the road is still buried by the earth. It is a very nice activity, but very hard, we are doing it little by little,” says César, another of the inhabitants of Fraguas.

Reforestation of the area is another project they have completed while residing in Fraguas. “We are doing reforestation every year, especially gall oaks, holm oaks, oaks, and junipers,” explains César.

In 2014, the Sierra de Guadalajara, where Fraguas is located, suffered a fire that destroyed more than a thousand hectares. “The entire area that caught fire was made up of resin pine trees, and we are reforesting it little by little with native trees. About a hundred people got together, we spent the whole day reforesting, and then we ate chanterelles with potatoes.”

But his project to recover this town has collapsed. The Government of Castilla-La Mancha denounced them before the courts. In June 2018, they were sentenced for crimes against the territory and for usurpation to one year and nine months in prison. The sentence also forced them to pay for the demolition of the houses that they had managed to rebuild. But the worst news came in July when the court estimated the cost of the demolition at €109,840.87.

In the academic world, there are several experts who have pointed out that the demolition of Fraguas would be illegal.

“In Fraguas there are a series of houses built in the style of black architecture, which is typical of this area and which is explicitly protected in the Castilla-La Mancha Heritage Law,” explains historian Alan Enrique Herchhoren, who collaborates with the Superior Council of Scientific Investigations (CSIC) in the recovery of architectural elements related to the civil war. The CSIC is considered the main public research organization in Spain.

In April 2021, the director of the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), integrated into the CSIC, sent a letter to the Guadalajara court warning that the entire town of Fraguas is likely to be protected. However, the court upheld its decision to demolish the town.

“The only thing those guys have done since the administration neglected all their duties, is to keep it. As bad as the administration likes it, those who have cleaned its streets and have done the work of recognizing that this town called Fraguas existed have been its repopulators,” says Herchhoren. “The fact of demolishing these houses supposes a patrimonial loss of the first order,” he says.

The University of Zaragoza has created a multidisciplinary group with professionals from archeology, social and natural sciences to evaluate the heritage value of Fraguas. “It is an international archeology group that may be able to stop the demolition,” explains Aracil, who points out that the creation of this group has already been communicated to the government of Castilla-La Mancha and in the next few days it will be communicated to the court.

This will be the last attempt to stop the demolition of Fraguas, and, if they succeed, they will also prevent six of its settlers from going to jail.

This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News.