There is no official documentation of this prison that was in operation until 1947, and perhaps that is why the female jails of Saturraran and Durango are better known. But that does not mean that this prison is of no importance to the Francoist network.

Now, historian Ascension Badiola has published the first monograph on the center:Dangerous Individuas (Vaccine, 2019). In total, it has brought together more than 1,200 prisoners, but the actual number of prisoners has increased considerably. In the absence of official documentation, he has had to resort to the Official State Gazette, the newspaper library and references of other historians in search of concrete data. And he has used the testimonies of women prisoners to collect the harsh prison conditions that they themselves called “the tomb of the living.”

The horrors started even before reaching Zornotza. As Pilar Pascual said: “They put us in a van where they carried pigs, and as we went up, we heard: Don’t get closer, we had to do crap on that corner because we had nowhere to do it.”

“In the morning, fasting, we were given a warm water shot; we were told they were throwing Maggi, but it didn’t taste,” explains Nieves Torres. The feeding conditions were so extreme that in 1942 they decided to go on a hunger strike. After three days without eating, they were given “cabbage and four potatoes” in the room.

Leonesa Amalia de la Fuente Peral, in order to be able to stay in the last days of pregnancy, requested to work in the kitchen and accepted the request: “I got up at four o’clock in the morning and my feet were very bad because I had been given so many hours of standing and because of the heat (...) Once a load of beans arrived and inside there were only bugs.”

In addition to food, there were important health and hygiene problems: “There was no medical service,” said Teopista Bárcena, “and we didn’t have minimal hygiene; there was no shower and we could only use a narrow and long cattle watering to clean it.”

Although not officially registered, young children also lived (and died) in prison. Thanks to the mothers' testimonies, we know about them, among other things, thanks to the Madrid cigarrera Julia Manzanal: “We slept on mattresses about 40 cm wide, one beside the other, and there were children among them. One night, many daughters got sick and Trinidad Gallego, nurse, told me it was meningitis and I had to say goodbye to my daughter. And so, little Julia, those beautiful eyes that every day changed color, went away (...) We spent the whole night calling the nuns, but in vain did not appear. When they arrived in the morning, he was dead.”

The communist Tomasa Cuevas used three words to describe Amorebieta's hell: “Chaos, stacking and horror.”