Timeline of the Spanish July 1936 coup

This timeline of Spanish July 1936 coup lists events which took place during 4 days between July 17 and July 20.events are lined up according to the most detailed work on the early days of the war that has been published so far, Miguel Platón, Así comenzó la Guerra Civil del 17 al 20 de julio de 1936: un golpe frustrado, Madrid 2018, ISBN 9788497391771. There is another, similarly detailed book, though formatted as a novel rather than a scientific historiographic account, see Luis Romero Largo, Tres días de julio, Madrid 2014, ISBN 9788434417496

While the start date is non-controversial, in historiography there is no agreement as to the end-date. It is widely accepted that technically speaking, the coup failed and the conflict assumed the format of a civil war. However, it is not clear at which point the coup might be considered over, and almost all works present the coup as an early stage of the general phenomenon known as the Spanish Civil War. Some works suggest that the coup turned into war on July 19;when the government agreed to "arm the people", i.e. distribute firearms to left-wing militias, Stanley G. Payne, Spain. A Unique History, Madison/London 2011, ISBN 9780299250249, p. 170 others advance the date of July 20;e.g. one scholar in his Timeline section under the heading 1936 lists "17-20 July: Military rising in Morocco and the Peninsula", and then under the new heading, Civil War, lists as the first entry "20 July: the republican Jose Giral forms a government", see Julian Casanova, The Spanish Civil War, London 2013, ISBN 978-1350127586, p. 17 some claim that the August/September airlift turned the failed coup into the war,Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, London 1966, p. 87; similarly, "What turned the attempted coup into a civil war and an international cause celebre on the left was the provision of German and Italian military aid to the rebels", Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War. Solidarity and Suspicion, Cambridge 2015, ISBN 9781107106277, p. 6 and some point even to November 1936, when the Nationalists were defeated at the gates of Madrid.see e.g. "The failed coup did not immediately translate into a long civil war .... It was only after the failure of the rebels to capture Madrid that the war settled into a relative stabilisation of the front lines", Andrew Dowling, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish History, London 2023, ISBN 9781000967449, p. 88 As this entry is supposed to provide possibly detailed timeline, it is limited to the first 80 hours of the conflict.

Hours are stated in WET, used in Morocco protectorate and most of Spain at the time; this applies also to events in the Canary Islands, the region which used UTC−01:00. Time is rounded to full-hour or half-hour, unless the exact hour is known.

Friday, July 17