Museu Memorial de l'Exili La Jonquera

The Exile Memorial Museum (MUME) is located in La Jonquera because this town became, in February 1939, the main entry point for half a million people who sought refuge in the French State. They were people of various cultural, social, ideological and religious origins, who had in common that they were fleeing war and repression. It is one of the great exoduses worldwide as a result of historical phenomena that decisively marked Europe in those years: the Civil War and the Second World War.

The MUME aims to explain and disseminate the exodus of 1939 and delve into all the drifts that arose from that historical phenomenon, such as the internment of refugees in French concentration camps, the deportation and separation of families due to the geography of France, the departure of thousands of refugees to Latin America, the decisive contribution of the Republican refugees in the resistance against National Socialist employment, the deportation of thousands of exiles to the Nazi extermination camps or the fight that many refugees later undertook in the recovery of freedoms in the Spanish State.

The MUME, then, explains, from historiographical rigor and from the desire to do pedagogy, the diverse and turbulent journey that tens of thousands of people traveled. A destiny, that of exiled people, that helps us understand our past and, at the same time, get closer to the humanitarian crisis of our days led by millions of refugees, from the five continents, who for various reasons have been forced to abandon their homes.

We address the understanding of the past of exile, and also of our present conditioned by migrations and refuge, from the MUME through multiple resources: the permanent exhibition, the temporary exhibitions, the art and memory proposal, the visit to the Canta-Mina Negrín de la Vajol mine, the Walter Benjamin Colloquium in Portbou, or guided itineraries through the main spaces of memory that we have within reach in Girona regions and also in Northern Catalonia.