Picasso's Guernica

We just passed the town of Guernica.
Picasso’s painting is based on the events that took place here on April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed this village of Guernica that had no strategic value. It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance. For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed.
With everything happening in Ukraine, Picasso's painting is more than ever relevant today. The original painting you can find in Madrid.Read more