Francisco Domingues Quintas

(Grijó, 30-04-1890 – Tarrafal, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, 22-09-1937)

The socialist Francisco Domingues Quintas, son of Maria Joaquina Rivéra and unknown father, was born in 1890, in Grijó.

Francisco was an industrialist and he lived with his sons, Patrício and Domingues Quintas, in Ferrol, Galicia, where they were exiled.

With the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, he was arrested at the post of Valencia on 28 August 1938 and deported from Spain, accused of taking “an active part in the communist revolutionary movement”. Handed over by the Spanish Civil Guard to the Portuguese political police, he was transferred, a few days later, to the Porto delegation and then to the Prison of Caxias. On 17 October 1936, he joined the first group of prisoners that embarked for the Concentration Camp of Tarrafal, in Cape Verde, with his two sons.

Suffering from malarial fever and without any medical treatment, he died at the age of 47, in Tarrafal, on 22 September 1937, less than a year after entering the so-called “camp of slow death”.

His sons remained in Tarrafal until 1940, after refusing the Christmas pardon of 1939. On 12 June 1943, they were again sent to the Concentration Camp, where they remained until October 1945.

At a time when many opponents of the dictatorship were in Galicia, several “Galician-Portuguese”, political and economic emigrants based in Galicia – most of whom were linked or affiliated to left-wing movements that were fighting the Francoist movement – were extradited to Portugal and sent to Tarrafal, where they established an autonomous group, the so-called “Galician group”, of which Francisco, Patrício and Domingues Quintas were a part of.