Marina Freixa always knew there was something dark and unspoken about her family.

Her mother had grown up under Spain's decades-long dictatorship, which ended in 1975, but the details of her childhood were hazy.

Then everything changed one Christmas a decade ago - when Marina was about 20.

That winter's evening around the table, with a cloud of cigarette smoke suspended in the air and wine glasses drained, Marina's mother, Mariona Roca Tort, began to speak.

"My parents reported me to the authorities," Mariona told them. "They put me in a reformatory when I was 17."

Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.

Marina and her cousins were stunned.

They couldn't comprehend that their grandparents had arranged to have their own daughter locked up.

Mariona's memory of telling this story to the youngsters in her family is blurred, she believes as a result of the psychiatric "treatment" she was forced to undergo at the reformatory. But Marina didn't forget the revelations, and years later, she would make a documentary telling her mother's story.

Mariona is a survivor of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer - the Women's Protection Board. Under dictator Francisco Franco, it oversaw a nationwide network of residential institutions managed by religious organisations. There's no definitive information about how many institutions were involved or how many girls were affected.

Thursday will mark 50 years since Franco's death. Spain has since seen a revolution in women's rights - but survivors of the Patronato are still waiting for answers and are now demanding an inquiry.

Warning: This article contains content that some readers might find distressing

Mariona, the oldest of nine siblings, describes her parents as right-wing and ultra-Catholic. They were so conservative they wouldn't even let Mariona wear trousers.

But in 1968, when she turned 16, a new world unfolded.

Mariona was tutoring children during the day, and preparing for university at evening classes. There, she says, she met people she'd never encountered before - trade unionists, left-wingers and anti-Franco activists. It was the year of global........

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