About the search engine
What the Causa General was
The Causa General was an investigation opened in 1940 by the Francoist regime, through the Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministerio Fiscal), into the alleged crimes committed in the Republican zone during the Spanish Civil War. The documentation is held at the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain's National Historical Archive) and is digitised on PARES. It contains accusations, witness statements and lists of victims and suspects: they are sources from the period, often unverified and sometimes false or biased, and must be read critically.
Included
Causa General
15,050 files · 740,480 images
Collection of the Fiscalía del Tribunal Supremo.
Includes the 1st División (the Oficina de tramitación e Inspección de la Causa General, the central level) and the 2nd División: the Causa General of each province, organised in pieces (pieza principal, Alzamiento Nacional, cárceles y sacas, checas, delitos contra la propiedad…).
Tribunales Populares y Jurados de Urgencia y de Guardia de Madrid
19,443 files · 631,892 images
Cases and summaries from 1936 (series «Causas y sumarios de los Tribunales Populares…») and files of the Secretaría General of the courts (series «Expedientes de la Secretaría General…»), with reference FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, bundles (legajos) 1 to 378.
How to search for a relative or a surname
Type a surname, or a first name and a surname: the results are the pages where all the words appear close to each other, in any order. The search engine accepts small spelling variants, because OCR makes mistakes. To search for an exact phrase, put it in quotation marks; to hide a word, put a hyphen in front of it. You can narrow down by province and by piece, and each result links to the original image on PARES, which is always the reference document.
What it does not cover
- The text is automatic OCR and has errors; the PARES document is always the reference.
- Only typewritten text is read well; handwritten pages are not read yet.
- A few images that PARES serves as empty or unavailable are not included.
Tools it uses
- PaddleOCR (PP-OCRv6): text recognition from the images; open source.
- OpenSearch: full-text index and search engine; open source.
- Python (Flask): web server and public API. The interface is our own HTML and JavaScript, with no third-party resources.