Hours earlier, Pepe Vásquez, 24 at the time, had been informed that he was required in the village cemetery. He dug a pit hard by the wall until it reached the depth of his chest. “It was to bury the first nine that they shot from Ubrique.

“We transferred the bodies to stretchers, because the mules couldn’t climb to the cemetery.”

He and his compatriots threw the bodies over the cemetery’s high wall. Señor Vásquez still remembers the August heat and how they doused everything in disinfectant to cover the stench.

The work continued into the autumn, as the cemetery’s boundaries filled with the unnamed dead from the neighbouring villages of Benamahoma, Grazalema and Prado del Rey. The nationalist plan ran like clockwork: the idea was to bury the dead from each village in another, where their families would find it harder to trace them.

Señor Vásquez affirms: “I didn’t even know what their names were.”

Later, with the consolidation of the dictatorship, people stopped asking themselves about the disappearance of their loved ones.

Two faces Señor Vásquez did recognise belonged to the postman from Benamahoma and his 15-year-old son. “Their bodies didn’t need to be carried up. They dealt with them there, against the cemetery wall.”

He remembers the face of a woman too. One of the burial party lifted her skirt and her knickers were missing. Señor Vásquez does not know if she was raped before being shot.

A week ago Pepe stood in the cemetery and watched as some 30 relatives of the victims believed to be buried in El Bosque’s cemetery observed Spain’s first official exhumation of its forgotten civil war dead get under way. It was supervised by two archaeologists from the regional government.

Virginia Pinto does not realise it, but she has become Spain’s Sam Ryan, the television forensic detective played by Amanda Burton in Silent Witness. Born two months after Franco died, Señorita Pinto’s training had better acquainted her with the burial rituals of the palaeolithic natives of the Rock of Gibraltar than the right-wing militias of 20th century Spain.

“It’s very emotionally charged,” she said. “More people keep turning up every day and I cannot ask them to stay away while we work. There’s one lady who doesn’t stop thanking us because after nearly 70 years she can finally recover her grandfather’s body.”

Among those gathered in the graveyard, listening to Señor Vásquez’s memories of that hot, murderous summer, were the grandchildren of José Bazán — Ana María, Alicia and Mateo. They knew where he was buried and what had happened to him. Their grandmother taught them to say a prayer every time they passed the bridge where he was shot.

“Our family feels no hate and we don’t want vengeance,” Ana María said. “After 70 years it doesn’t matter. What’s important is to recover him and remember. As far as we are concerned the history of our country cannot be written until his bones are given a proper burial.”

Mateo added: “We’ve had 27 years of democracy, it’s understandable that under the dictatorship the subject was taboo. But it isn’t normal that we still don’t speak about it.”

Señor Vásquez still worries about the consequences of his actions. “There are probably people who are saying ‘We should have shot and buried you alongside the others and then nobody would have ever known’,” he said.

“But what can they do to me at my age? There are others like me in villages all over Spain who could do now what I have done if they wanted.”