The Children of Lemóniz

No matter how adverse the circumstances are, love, friendship, and care always triumph.

2017. Ángela is a forty-two-year-old woman who is about to be a mother for the first time. When she picks up boxes from her old apartment to move to her new home, she finds one with keepsakes from her childhood, when she went to a Basque Language school in the Basque Country.

Flashback to 1978. Ángela has just turned three. Her father is one of the engineers at the nuclear plant in Lemóniz. The family lives in a small village in the Basque Country. Around this time, ETA commits its first deadly attack against the plant. We follow Ángela’s and her friend Laura’s childhoods as their parents try to protect them from an ever more hostile reality. Against the dramatic backdrop of growing terrorism in the 1970s and 80s, these girls’ innocence is on display. There are invisible victims, the ones nobody will ever speak of.

A novelized testimony of a dramatic moment in Spanish history, based on real events, with the names of some people and places changed to protect the privacy of direct family members of ETA’s victims during its attacks on the Lemóniz nuclear plant.

Estela Baz is Cross-Departmental Project Manager at Atresmedia. Ángela’s story is based on real events and draws largely on the author’s own experiences.