At a glance:

• No national laws, policies, or guidance on repatriation
• No meaningful way to engage with institutions in Spain on the issue of repatriation at the moment

Overview

Spain has not really been engaged with repatriation aside from returning recently illegally trafficked items. The repatriation debate has only just arrived in Spain.

Spain’s lack of engagement with repatriation has been for a number of reasons; lack of institutional interest, lack of claims, and perhaps most crucially a lack of government support.

Amy Shakespeare

National museums in Spain cannot act on their own initiative. The national government agency, Junta de Valoración, Exportación e Importación (Board for Qualification, Valuation and Exportation of Historical Heritage Assets), is in charge of deciding what national museums acquire, what the state is selling, and ultimately any repatriation decisions would need to be approved by them.

The Board is reported to have little focus on Indigenous items which may have also contributed to the lack of discussion of repatriation.

Amy Shakespeare

In October 2022, the Spanish Ministry of Culture announced that they were going to create a Commission for Decolonisation. However, just a few weeks later the Culture Minister, Miquel Iceta said in Parliament, ‘How do you even decolonise a museum?’ As of 2023, plans for the Commission appeared to have stalled due to opposition from right wing politicians.

In January 2024, the new Culture Minister, Ernest Urtasun, announced a review process of the collections of state museums that “make it possible to overcome a colonial framework or one anchored in gender or ethnocentric inertia that has, on many occasions, hindered” the vision of heritage, history and artistic legacy.’ There is no explicit mention of repatriation in the announcement, but this page will be updated when there is more information.

Previous returns and denied claims

Spain has conducted a couple of returns, but also has a history of denying repatriation claims.

The first repatriation from Spain was a Tswana man who had been stolen from his grave, made into taxidermy, and displayed in the Darder Museum. He was commonly referred to as the ‘Negro of Banyoles’ and he was returned to Botswana in 2000. It is a very disturbing story, so no links are included here, but there is information about the case online.

In 2014, 691 pieces of archaeology were returned to Colombia following the so-called ‘Operation Florence’. The operation recovered pieces that were the result of investigations into money laundering and drug trafficking, through which the pieces were found to have been purchased in Colombia and exported illegally.

Spain returned two Flemish paintings that were looted by Nazi forces during World War Two and returned to Poland in January 2023.

In 2022, a family from Catalonia in Spain voluntarily decided to return 2522 pre-Hispanic artefacts to the Mexican government. It’s important to note that the Spanish government had no involvement in this decision.

However, there also have been a number of claims that have been denied.

The National Museum of Anthropology rejected a claim from a museum in the Canary Islands for a number of mummified people.

When Columbia made a request for the Quimbaya collection in 2017, the Spanish government rejected the claim by ruling that the collection is considered an ‘asset of cultural interest’ in Spain, thus preventing its sale or export.

Therefore, there doesn’t appear to be a meaningful way to engage with institutions in Spain on the issue of repatriation at the moment.