Between Two Fires, Drama Beneath the Surface in a Spanish Village

British journalist, editor, world traveller, and old Spain hand David Baird has written a new book, his seventh, and he didn’t have to go far to research it. He’s been sitting virtually on top of it since he arrived in the Andalusian village of Frigiliana to live in 1971. Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras, about to be published by Maroma Press in English and Editorial Almuzara in Spanish (where the title is Entre dos fuegos: Guerra sin cuartel en las sierras andaluzas) tells the long-ignored story of “the people of the sierra”. This was the anti-Franco guerrilla movement which operated in the mountains of Spain’s Málaga and Granada provinces in the 1940s and 50s during the fierce Franco repression after the Spanish Civil War.

For years Baird had heard hushed references to “la gente de la sierra”, and “el maquis”, as the anti-Franco resistance fighters were known, but it wasn’t till he started doing his research for Between Two Fires that he discovered that his own adopted village of Frigiliana was one of the principal centers both for guerrilla and counter-guerrilla activity.