The purpose of the exhibition is to offer a historical and emotional journey about the Spanish exiles in North Africa. Some 13,000 Spaniards made it to North Africa in March 1939, at the end of the Civil War. However, in 1945 it is estimated that only about 8,000 people remained in the Maghreb region after half of those who had arrived in Tunisia returned to Spain, while others enlisted with the Allied forces, some were taken to the USSR, others were shipped off to the Americas, and still more died in the concentration camps.
 
At the end of the independence processes in the Maghreb region, in 1962, it is estimated that only about 2,000 exiles remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. What happened to these Spanish citizens, living between Europe, Africa and the Americas amid exile, life and death? How can we trace their different paths and recover the marks left behind by their tragedies? The exhibition “On Exodus and Wind: Spanish exile in North Africa (1939-1962),” an initiative by Casa Árabe and Spain’s Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, gives us the opportunity to recover historical memory, and to deepen and spread knowledge about one of the most unknown groups of exiles, that of the Spanish Republicans in the Maghreb region.
 
The exhibition has received the support of José Miguel Santacreu Soler (University of Alicante) as the scientific curator and Juan Valbuena as its visual curator, with the backing of an advisory committee made up of specialists Bernabé López García, Daniel Moñino Reyes, Eliane Ortega Bernabeu and Rafael Sebastiá Alcaraz. 
 
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