At the vast monument in the mountains north of Madrid where the dictator Francisco Franco was once buried, a long, orderly queue is forming. Standing beneath the 150m stone cross that crowns this site, known as The Valley of the Fallen, the people are waiting to enter the basilica-crypt that is drilled 260m into the mountain in order to attend Sunday Mass.
Although a religious service is held here every week, on this occasion many more people than normal have turned out, heeding calls for a protest against the government’s plans to “resignify” the monument in order to ensure that it no longer glorifies Franco.
“If what I’ve heard is true, which is that they want to resignify the interior of the basilica and replace it with an incorrect interpretation of history, then it’s a disgrace,” says Jorge García (25), who is queuing. He is wearing the red beret associated with the Carlist soldiers who fought on Franco’s side in the 1936-1939 civil war.
He adds that the plans are “a propaganda campaign by the government and freemasons to rewrite history”.
Nearby in the queue, a young man has wrapped himself in the Carlist flag. By the entrance to the basilica, another shouts “Long live Spain! Long live Christ the King!”
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“There is a risk that, under the aegis of a word that we don’t really understand, ‘resignification’, they want to destroy what we have here,” says a middle-aged man, Vicente Martínez, who is queuing with his wife.
When asked if he is a Francoist, he replies: “We’re Catholics. Franco did good things and bad things which are now part of the country’s history.
“Fifty years have passed. We should have got over all this. What the government wants to do is win a war which has already been fought – they want to win the war that they lost. They want revenge.”
This is the latest chapter in the Socialist-led government’s attempts to tackle the thorny issue of Spain’s historical memory. Every effort to do so is met with a fierce backlash from the right and the allegation that the past is being used as a political weapon. As the biggest symbol of Franco’s brutal 36-year regime and his legacy, the Valley of the Fallen is the most obvious, yet also the most awkward, pending task in this area.
The site was built on Franco’s orders, using prisoners from the leftist Republican side he had defeated in the war. Completed in 1958, it was a monument to his victory, dedicated to “the heroes and martyrs of the Crusade”.
About 34,000 victims from both sides of the conflict were buried in unmarked boxes in crypts there after being transferred, without permission, from their original burial sites. Its symbols, including the giant cross and Francoist shields carved into its walls, project the dictator’s National-Catholicism ideology. His burial there in 1975, behind the altar in the basilica, cemented its status as a place dedicated to glorifying his memory.
In 2019 the government of Socialist Pedro Sánchez exhumed the remains of Franco and reburied them in a private cemetery.
In 2023 the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, a fascist party that supported Franco, were also removed. Meanwhile, a Democratic Memory Law was passed, which included the express aim to “resignify” the Valley of the Fallen, which was renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros.
“The fact that the dictator is no longer in [the site] solves one anomaly that Spain had,” says Eduardo Ranz, a lawyer who represents families who are trying to recover the remains of loved ones buried at the monument.
But, he adds, the Valley of the Fallen “is the only monument in the world which commemorates the victory of winners over the vanquished when both were of the same nationality.”
The government is now inviting proposals by architects, with €30.5 million available, to turn the site into what the justice minister, Félix Bolaños, said should be “a monument to democracy, to European values, to concord, to coexistence, to what Spain is in 2025″. The winning bid is due to be chosen by September and the project begun in 2027.
The revamped site is expected to ensure that historical information currently lacking about Franco and how the site was built is included. The cross, the biggest of its kind in the world, will remain and a museum or interpretation centre is due to be built on a vast esplanade that looks out over a valley and across to the Guadarrama Mountains.
As the Spanish government seeks to remedy what many feel makes the country an outlier, it has looked for inspiration to other monuments around the world that commemorate the victims of atrocities. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile, and the Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, are some of the existing sites that offer guidance.
However, Ranz points out that in all of those cases there was a political consensus driving them, something Spain still lacks.
The conservative Popular Party (PP) has frequently attacked Sánchez’s policies in this area, labelling them a cynical use of history. It accuses him of using what it calls “the Franco wild card” whenever it suits him, to distract from his own problems. His government’s efforts to play up this year’s 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death with a series of public events – which appear to be falling flat – is one such case, the PP alleges.
The far-right Vox has been even more vocal with its criticism, and hardly coy about being associated with Francoism. A politician from the party, Antonio Gili, posted pictures of himself at the site on April 1st, the anniversary of Franco’s victory in the civil war, with the caption: “Honour and glory to all those who died for Spain!!” The same day, his party colleague Sergio Rodríguez declared “happy victory day” to members of the Balearic parliament.
Some pro-Franco activists have turned against the Spanish church, alleging that it and the Vatican have caved in
Although initially the government had planned to remove a community of Benedictine monks that administers the site as part of efforts to make it secular, they are now allowed to stay, following negotiations between Madrid and the Vatican. However, those same talks appear to have led to the recent replacement of the prior, Santiago Cantera.
Cantera, an avowed Francoist who ran on the Falange electoral ticket in the 1990s and blessed the dictator’s remains during the 2019 exhumation, consistently sought to block historical memory initiatives at the Valley of the Fallen.
The hardline bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, José Ignacio Munilla, said the prior’s removal was the price paid for keeping the Benedictine community at the Valley of the Fallen.
“Santiago Cantera is the man who has given Spain the moral lesson it needed,” he said.
However, some pro-Franco activists have turned against the Spanish church, alleging that it and the Vatican have caved in to what they see as the anti-Catholic agenda of Sánchez’s government.
IPSE, a right-wing Catholic organisation, warned that “the silence and inaction of the church could lead to an unprecedented split with the faithful” and it said the government was intent on converting the Valley of the Fallen “into a centre of politicised historical memory”.
