Abstract
This article interprets José Ramón Fernández’s play La tierra, linking the crime at the center of the plot (the murder of a wretched man by a group of people and the shameful burial of his body) both to the mass graves during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and to the contemporary history of different countries, not only of Europe. The context of this interpretation is a more general consideration about the historical memory, particularly present in the Spanish theater of the past two decades.