1918. The Spanish Flu

In 1918, a pandemic tore through Spain with devastating speed. Children were its most visible victims, with mortality rates among the infected reaching 80 per cent. The country was left half-empty, its losses recorded in documents that have since gathered dust at the margins of official memory.

What makes that silence so striking is the question this documentary sets out to answer: why do we know so little about an event of such magnitude, and what might its study have prevented? Director Alberto Esteban draws on archival sources and the testimony of virologists, historians, demographers, and sociologists to reconstruct the pandemic's course across Spain, while pressing on the broader implications of that collective forgetting.

The programme does not treat 1918 as a closed chapter. Produced in 2021, it arrives with the uncomfortable clarity that the lessons of the Spanish Flu were available, and largely ignored, when later crises emerged. In an overpopulated, interconnected world, the vulnerabilities exposed a century ago have not disappeared.

Rigorous and quietly sobering, this RTVE production makes the case that historical memory is not simply a matter of record. It is, in certain circumstances, a matter of survival.