Ninety years after the bombing of the childcare centre La Gota de Leche in Madrid the event is being discussed anew. The occasion is a series of recent articles recalling the attack of 30 October 1936 and addressing the identity of a child victim whose image was circulated on posters by the Republic. At the centre of the debate is a photograph that circulated internationally as propaganda evidence of the horrors and is now often associated with the name María Santiago .
The established facts are clear: on 30 October 1936, several air raids hit central Madrid. At Calle de la Espada, number 9, La Gota de Leche, a facility providing care for mothers and children, was badly damaged. Contemporary reports describe numerous civilian deaths. Some reports in the press at the time refer to around 60 children killed at the site. The attack took place in the early stages of the Batalla de Madrid and is linked in research to low-level attacks by the coup forces.
These facts are documented in municipal records and academic studies. The Ayuntamiento de Madrid and the Comisionado de la Memoria Histórica give the location of the attack and place it in the city’s history. Image catalogues at the Biblioteca Nacional de España document the destruction in Madrid between 1936 and 1939. Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid place the bombings in the context of military strategy and their urban consequences.
However, the exact identification of the dead girl shown in Republican photographic media remains disputed. Several modern accounts give her name as María Santiago, sometimes linking her to the count as “Victim Number 35”. An examination of the available primary sources—official victim lists, contemporary identification notes in photographic collections or death registers—has so far failed to verify this named attribution beyond doubt. It is therefore a widespread but unverified attribution.
The debate points to a fundamental problem in researching the Spanish Civil War: the links between iconic images and individual biographies are often incomplete. Reliable confirmation would require consistent primary documents, including official register entries or clearly labelled original negatives at the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Until such evidence is available, the name should be treated as unconfirmed, while the documented facts of the attack, its location and date, and the high number of civilian casualties can be considered established.
Editor: Mira Cadena (Article created with AI assistance).