Spain’s Guernica marks 80’th anniversary of bombing

GUERNICA, Spain: Some 200 people gathered at a cemetery in the northern Spanish town of Guernica on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of its bombing by Nazi warplanes during the Spanish civil war.

At 4:30 pm (1430 GMT) -- the moment the bombing began 80 years ago -- representatives of victims associations laid floral wreaths at a monument in the Zollo cemetery dedicated to those killed in an attack that inspired Pablo Picasso’s famed "Guernica" painting.

"A rain of fire, blood and death fell upon us," Luis Iriondo, a 94-year-old survivor of the air raid, told the gathering. He also appealed for the end of bombings in Syria and other war zones around the world.

Aircraft from Adolf Hitler’s "Condor Legion" sent to Spain to support General Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces carpet-bombed the town on the afternoon of April 26, 1937 for over three hours. Historians estimate the air raid killed between 150 and 300 people, many of them attending a weekly market in the centre of the town.

It was one of the first-ever carpet bombing raids on a civilian centre, an atrocity that shocked the world and was immortalised in Picasso’s haunting anti-war painting that year.