1947 Cádiz explosion

The Cádiz explosion was a military accident which occurred at 9:45 pm, on 18 August 1947 at a storage depot in the Base de Defensas Submarinas (Submarine Defence Base) in Cádiz, Spain, when some 1,737 sea mines, torpedoes and depth charges (of a total of 2,228 distributed in two depots), containing 200 tonnes of TNT and amatol, exploded for unknown reasons.

[5] This shipyard had signed a lucrative contract in the mid-1920s to supply the German Navy with German-designed torpedoes and had also built a U-Boat for testing and training.

[9] On 26 August, the front page of La Vanguardia carried a statement from Radio Nacional de España officially accusing the BBC of an "ongoing campaign of defamation against the Régimen and the Spanish nation".

The press release ended with, “One has only to contrast this deceitful behaviour of the BBC, and its hatred of Spain and its Régimen, a falsehood which we have had occasion to demonstrate as such, with the clean and moral history of Spanish radio which has never yet been shown to have erred or been mistaken in any of its news items.”[10] The press release stated that the "mines that caused the explosion were from the 'Reds' and Russian-made, and that they were less stable than Spanish mines precisely for that reason".

[11] The situation was so dire that, among other initiatives, the following year the Francoist Regime decided to permit the return of the Carnival for which the city had been famous before Franco prohibited it after the Civil War.