Engineering Redemption: Francoist Colonisation Villages and the Making of Spain’s Fascist Landscape

This article situates Francoist colonisation villages within broader debates about nature and nation in twentieth-century fascist regimes. It argues that the Franco regime’s ambitious hydraulic program – dams and irrigation networks – must be understood both as a material reconfiguration of territory and as an authoritarian strategy for reorganising rural populations. Through the coordination of hydraulic engineering, agricultural planning and settlement construction, the Instituto Nacional de Colonización y Desarrollo Rural (National Institute of Colonisation) consolidated a new irrigated agrarian order while reinforcing existing landholding structures and producing technically trained, politically loyal subjects. Alongside these material interventions, newsreels played a crucial role in shaping the meanings attached to this transformed national nature, framing the domestication of water and territory as a providential project of national regeneration and representing colonisation villages as idealised rural communities. By analysing their cinematic representation, this article highlights the importance of visual construction in naturalising authoritarian modernisation while obscuring social conflict and ecological disruption. Colonisation villages thus emerge as key nodes in the fusion of hydraulic modernisation, political control and national mythmaking.