Soneja was one of the localities where the Column of Order and Occupation Police of Valencia announced, as of April 7, that what the victorious army itself called a "concentration camp" had been established. This field of Soneja was located, strictly speaking, in the same building where the paper industry of Soneja was located, as well as in its surrounding fields; all this, at the start of Cap de l'Horta, located on the right bank of the Palancia.

The field reached an approximate extension of 2'5 ha (25 000 m2), the entire surface being surrounded by a low line of hawthorn, the more than 600 linear meters of which unfolded along the acacias that flanked the stretch of road before the bridge and on the sides of some paths and cultivated fields. The retained republican soldiers crowded into the closed compound, while the commands of the Franco army and the rest of the personnel in charge of monitoring the camp resided in the main building of the Paperera del Palancia. The lands occupied by prisoners, or simply where they were allowed to move, also extended to other opposing parties, such as the Mantellina, Noyanta, the Salt, Barrachina and up to the Garroferal, on the left bank of the river, where the yarns they were non-existent. The boundaries of the field, therefore and in a broad sense, reached the start of Garroferal to the north, that of Cap de l'Horta to the east, the urban core to the south, and to the west the road that leaves the town to cross the river in the direction of Almedíjar.

The mass of people captured came to occupy about 52 ha (520,000 m2) in total. Even so, the prisoners with the highest grade were held in another building, about 600 m away from the bin. It was the hermitage of Sant Francesc Xavier. And if it is understood as a complementary task the fact of keeping different prisoners separately in one building and another, depending on the military graduation of those, then both centers coexisting in the same locality can be qualified as "a concentration complex" .

In the short month that the Soneja camp remained active (it closed on May 2), as well as the nearby Sot de Ferrer (closed on the previous April 26), 25,299 prisoners passed through the gates, for no reason other than to be classified and redistributed where this classification occurs to them.


[Information taken from Rodríguez and Rodríguez, M.-À. (2019). "Soneja 1936-1939: Rearguard in War, Concentration Camp in Postwar (Part II)". Bulletin of the Institut de Cultura Alt Palancia, 26, p. 93-120. Segorbe (Castelló): Institute of Culture Alt Palancia. Available at the Municipal Library of Soneja ia
ICAP Bulletin nº 26