Estépar is the site of multiple mass graves, discovered by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in 2014.

[2] Initial reports referred to the graves containing the remains of at least 70 republicans who were killed by nationalists in August–September 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.

[3] The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory make efforts to identify the bodies they exhume.

However, by the time of the excavations at Estépar, the Spanish government under Mariano Rajoy did not give state support to such work,[4] and the Association indicated that at this site the task of identification was going to be complex.

Among the people believed to have been killed at Estépar who remain to be identified are the composer Antonio José Martínez Palacios and his brother.