AdoptadosBilbao: digital memory of victims of stolen babies in Biscay and Spain
The report REPORT ON THE BLOG AdoptadosBilbao.Blogspot.com reconstructs the testimonial, documentary and symbolic value of one of the first digital spaces in Spain devoted to denouncing illegal adoptions, stolen babies, concealment of filiations and the search for origins linked to the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao.
The blog was created by Carmen, known as GotasDeLluvia, a member of Colectivo Sin Identidad, after being reunited with her biological son. From that space, mothers, adopted people and relatives began to break the silence, share data, identify names and search for those who had been separated through the network of irregular adoptions in Bilbao and Biscay.
This page does not present the blog as a mere old page on the Internet. It presents it as a public archive of victims: a digital memory that preceded institutional recognition, many investigations and the judgments that years later would confirm part of what the victims were already denouncing.
Quick access
The AdoptadosBilbao project is organised as a main report and as digital annexes. The original blog remains a historical source of public memory, denunciation and search.
Related
This page should be read together with the IAMM report on the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao. Both documents are part of the same archive on stolen babies in Spain, but they perform different functions.
IAMM reconstructs the Maria Madre entity as a documentary object: its foundation, structure, Church-State cover, statutes, headquarters, officers, activity and institutional responsibility.
AdoptadosBilbao reconstructs the public memory of the victims: the blog, the testimonies, the searches, the names identified, the patterns denounced and the role of the Internet as an archive of resistance.
See the IAMM report page on the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao
On this page
- What AdoptadosBilbao was
- Carmen / GotasDeLluvia
- Why this blog matters
- The blog as an archive of victims
- Connection with Maria Madre and Mercedes Herrán de Gras
- People, institutions and structures identified
- The case of Olmo and Amaia Gómez Aldaz
- Testimonial, documentary and evidentiary value
- Strengths and limits of the blog
- Digital preservation of the archive
- Documentary structure of the project
- Main report, digital annexes and records
- Access to the report and archive
- Recommended citation
What AdoptadosBilbao was
AdoptadosBilbao.Blogspot.com was a historical blog created in the early 2010s to bring together adopted people, biological mothers and relatives affected by irregular adoptions in Bilbao, Biscay and the environment of the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao.
Its header already showed a direct intention: to search for children and mothers from the 1960s to the 1980s in Bilbao, gather data, break the silence and identify Mercedes Herrán de Gras as a common point in many accounts of irregular adoption.
The blog did not function as a private diary. It functioned as a public space of denunciation, collective appeal, spontaneous archive, contact point and search tool for victims who found no answer in registries, courts, provincial councils, religious institutions or public administrations.
Carmen / GotasDeLluvia
Carmen, known on the Internet as GotasDeLluvia, created AdoptadosBilbao after being reunited with her biological son. Her gesture was foundational: she turned a personal search experience into a common space for other victims.
Her work allowed scattered, isolated or silenced people to begin to see themselves as part of the same pattern. The blog offered a contact email, published accounts, collected names, shared clues and sustained a collective memory while institutions continued to deny, remain silent or close archives.
Carmen died in 2021, but her work opened a public path of memory and mutual support that continued to produce effects years later. AdoptadosBilbao was one of the seeds of the community of victims linked to Maria Madre.
Why this blog matters
AdoptadosBilbao matters because it appeared before there was any clear institutional recognition of these victims. Before the reports, before many investigations, before the judicial decisions, the victims were already writing, searching and denouncing.
The blog functioned as a first infrastructure of truth: a place where affected people could publish data, suspicions, dates, hospitals, names, family accounts and experiences of documentary concealment.
Its value does not lie only in each isolated entry, but in the convergence of accounts. Many testimonies pointed to the same names, the same practices, the same administrative silences and the same impossibility of accessing files.
The blog as an archive of victims
AdoptadosBilbao was an archive of victims built from below. It was not born from an institution, a court, a university or a public administration. It was born from people searching for their mothers, their children, their siblings or their own identity.
Its content brought together public appeals, testimonies, fragments of memory, denunciations of concealment, criticism of the judicial system, references to civil registries, mentions of missing files, press reports and useful data so that other affected people could recognise themselves.
That spontaneous character does not reduce its value. On the contrary: it shows how the memory of stolen babies was sustained for years outside institutions, in precarious, personal and digital spaces, while official channels remained blocked.
Connection with Maria Madre and Mercedes Herrán de Gras
The report identifies AdoptadosBilbao as a source directly linked to the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao and to Mercedes Herrán de Gras. The blog placed the so-called “Mrs de Gras” as a common point among different cases of irregular adoptions in Bilbao.
In the accounts collected, Mercedes Herrán de Gras appears as an operational figure: intermediary, coordinator of arrangements, link between mothers, adoptive families, doctors, registries and private circuits for the transfer of minors.
The IAMM report page completes this reading: there the legal, administrative and ecclesiastical existence of Maria Madre is reconstructed. Here, the public memory of the victims who denounced that same network from the Internet is reconstructed.
Read also the report on the Maria Madre Association of Bilbao
People, institutions and structures identified
The report gathers the map of names, institutions and functions that appear recurrently in the AdoptadosBilbao blog as part of the victims’ public account of illegal adoptions in Bilbao. It is not a closed judicial list. It is a map of actors identified in the digital memory of the victims.
- Mercedes Herrán de Gras / Mrs de Gras: central figure in the blog’s accounts, identified as operational manager, intermediary and common point in cases of irregular adoptions linked to Maria Madre.
- Javier Ybarra y Bergé: mentioned as president of Maria Madre in 1969 and as a figure of the institutional elite related to structures of guardianship and child protection.
- Maria Madre Association of Bilbao: entity linked to the accounts of illegal adoptions, identity abduction and irregular transfer of minors.
- Diocese of Bilbao: ecclesiastical structure linked to the institutional framework of Maria Madre and to the system of moral legitimisation of these practices.
- Caritas Diocesana of Bilbao: institution mentioned in relation to archives, files, premises, assistance cover and possible accumulated documentation.
- Civil registries: identified in the accounts as spaces where false registrations, altered birth records or blocks on information may have been legitimised.
- Juvenile courts: mentioned as structures associated with minors, guardianship, files and lack of documentary transparency.
- Provincial councils and social welfare bodies: identified as possible holders of files, archives or retained documentation.
- Religious institutions and orders of nuns: mentioned in accounts concerning referral of pregnant women, maternity homes, births and transfer of babies.
- Doctors, registrars and officials: identified as roles necessary to sustain false births, manipulated records, certificates and irregular documentation.
- Adoptive families linked to private transfer circuits: final recipients of some of the minors separated from their biological mothers.
This section does not replace a judicial investigation. It orders the actors that the report identifies as part of the map of denunciation, memory and search built by the victims.
The case of Olmo and Amaia Gómez Aldaz
The report also includes the direct relationship between AdoptadosBilbao and the case of Olmo Gómez Aldaz. Olmo discovered the blog in September 2010, when he was beginning his search for origins and still did not know that his adoption could be part of an illegal network.
Through Carmen / GotasDeLluvia, he published his birth data in the search network. Weeks later, a woman named Amaia responded through those contacts. Both underwent a DNA test at the Complutense University of Madrid, which confirmed that they were full biological siblings.
That reunion shows that the blog was not only a space of denunciation. It was also a real tool for the restitution of identity. The digital memory of the victims allowed a family and biological truth to emerge where institutions had produced silence.
Testimonial, documentary and evidentiary value
The report does not present AdoptadosBilbao as the sole piece of evidence. It presents it as a source of collective memory, contextual evidence and historical precedent.
Its evidentiary value comes from several elements: the age of the publications, the convergence of accounts, the repetition of names and patterns, the connection with external sources, the relationship with real searches and the fact that the victims were already publicly denouncing these practices years before judicial or media recognition.
AdoptadosBilbao makes it possible to show that the denunciations were not born after the judgments. They preceded them. The victims spoke, searched and denounced when the State still offered no truth, justice or reparation.
Strengths and limits of the blog
The report acknowledges that AdoptadosBilbao is not an administrative archive or a judicial database. Much of its content comes from testimonies, accounts, personal posts, press articles, comments and publications by victims.
That nature requires a critical reading: not all data have the same degree of verification, some people appear under aliases, certain dates are incomplete and many entries do not provide full official documentation.
But those limits do not destroy its value. They define its function. AdoptadosBilbao is a source of social memory, contextual evidence, an early archive of victims and a public testimony of how collective denunciation was built while institutions remained closed.
Digital preservation of the archive
The report is part of a documentary set that preserves the blog AdoptadosBilbao.Blogspot.com through web archiving techniques. The digital annexes collect the complete blog archive in preservation formats such as WARC and WACZ.
This preservation is essential because it turns a vulnerable digital memory into a stable archive. A blog can disappear, change, lose images, break links or become hidden. A preserved archive makes it possible to conserve its content, structure and historical value.
Publication on Zenodo also allows DOI assignment to the report and the digital annexes, facilitating citation, location, conservation and use as a documentary source.
Documentary structure of the project
The AdoptadosBilbao project is organised into two complementary pieces: the main report and the digital annexes.
The main report analyses the testimonial, documentary, symbolic and memorial value of the blog. It explains its origin, its author, its context, its contents, the names that appear, its strengths, its limits, its relationship with the case of Olmo Gómez Aldaz and its value within the framework of democratic memory.
The digital annexes preserve the complete blog and its structure through web archive formats. Their function is to conserve the original digital source so that it can be consulted, cited, verified and preserved beyond the fragility of the Internet.
The documentary logic is clear: the report interprets and contextualises; the digital annexes preserve the archive.
Main report, digital annexes and records
Access to the report and archive
The main report and the digital annexes are preserved on Zenodo with DOI. The original blog remains accessible on Blogspot as a historical source of public memory.
Recommended citation
Gómez Aldaz, Olmo. REPORT ON THE BLOG AdoptadosBilbao.Blogspot.com. Reconstruction of public memory on the network of illegal adoptions in Biscay. Version 1.1. Tudela de Duero, Valladolid, 18 October 2025. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17387724.