Musée de la Mémoire

  Cultural and remembrance space of the City of Portet-sur-Garonne, the Museum of Memory was inaugurated on February 6, 2003 in the presence of Mr. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner. Since the end of September 2021, the Museum of Memory has been labeled “Tourism & Handicap” for the 4 disabilities (hearing, mental, motor and visual).

Installed in an old building of the Récébédou camp, the Museum is part of a desire to transmit a story. Its ambition is to be a place of memory, but also a tool for reflection and knowledge.
Through this educational aim, the Museum hosts a permanent exhibition, a model of the camp, and temporary exhibitions so that everyone can reclaim a past shared by all. It also allows on-site consultation of a certain number of works dealing more particularly with internment camps.

Originally a working-class town, the Récébédou camp was transformed into an accommodation center for Spanish Republican refugees and foreign Jews after the anti-Jewish laws of October 1940. Under the Vichy government, it became a camp-hospital.
Very quickly the living conditions deteriorated: insufficient food, lack of care… Three convoys left Portet-Saint-Simon station for the death camps. It will be closed at the end of September 1942 following the protest of Monsignor Saliège.
Upon liberation, Spanish Republicans who had survived the Mauthausen concentration camp settled in a dozen barracks. This enclave in the ex-camp of Récébédou will be called “La Villa Don Quichotte” symbolizing exile and the impossible return to Francoist Spain.
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the exile of the Spanish Republicans, a Memorial to the Retirada was inaugurated in front of the Museum of Memory on February 2, 2019.