Ruta al Exilio Launches Its 7th Edition Exploring Memory, Resistance, and Youth Engagement

The original Spanish version of this press release is available here.

The seventh edition of Ruta al Exilio is now open for applications. This pedagogical initiative on historical memory brings together 40 young people aged 16 to 17 from across Spain, who take part—free of charge—in a journey through key sites of anti-fascist memory in the trans-Pyrenean region. The 2026 route will take place from 15 to 28 July. Applications are open until 14 May, and selected participants will be announced in the first half of June.

This year’s theme, “Besar el pan” (“Kissing the bread”), pays tribute to those who survived under dictatorship and resisted rationing through everyday practices. It also honours those who, in earlier years, established communal kitchens, collectivised land, and created supply committees. The project seeks to explore the genealogies of struggle embedded in these gestures—acts through which people imagined a different country and a different future.

Following the success of its previous editions—Un millar de huellas (2021), Los presentes desterrados (2022), Cicatrices del paisaje (2023), Arqueología de un bolsillo (2024), and Una tierra por cantar (2025)—Ruta al Exilio has expanded its activities in 2026 with the launch of a new spring route. The first edition of “Andalucía a contraluz” was successfully completed just a few weeks ago.

To mark the project’s fifth anniversary, the Instituto de la Juventud has supported and funded the exhibition Nuevo Almanaque Nacional de Resistencias, Juventud y Memoria, inaugurated on 5 March in collaboration with the Commissioner for the commemoration of 50 years of Spain in Freedom. Curated by members of the Ruta al Exilio association, the exhibition is open to the public at the Fundación Ortega-Marañón in Madrid until 24 April.

The spirit of the project

Sharing, walking, feeling, and creating are at the core of Ruta al Exilio. The project fosters autonomy, critical reflection, and the development of ethical and emotional competencies among young participants, promoting a model of experiential learning grounded in lived experience.

Memory is multifaceted and complex. There are many ways to resist and to construct narratives of memory, understood as everyday practices against oblivion, uprootedness, and the loss of identity. In this sense, the project creates spaces where young people can engage with, participate in, and integrate memory into their daily lives.

The sites visited along the route hold strong evocative power. They bring together histories of repression and resistance, woven into a shared narrative that resonates with present-day challenges.

As Anna Pastor, Pedagogical Coordinator of Ruta al Exilio, explains, the project aims to help young people understand the Spanish Republican exile as a complex diaspora shaped by a war that, although fought on Spanish soil, had an international dimension. It also reflects on exile in relation to emotional communities in host countries, and on how displacement and the failure of political projects shape individual and collective identities. These reflections are connected to broader 20th-century exoduses and to contemporary forms of migration—economic, political, and environmental.

Throughout the route, participants take part in workshops led by educators, artists, researchers, and local actors. At the same time, each participant develops their own creative project, exploring a wide range of artistic disciplines.