Franco’s mausoleum: huge monument that divides Spain

Topped by a vast towering cross, the monumental mausoleum where Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco is buried still divides the country more than 40 years after his death.

Spain’s Supreme Court on Tuesday gave its green light to the government’s plans to remove his remains to another site after more than a year of bitter dispute between Madrid and Franco’s descendants.

Inaugurated by Franco on April 1, 1959, the imposing monument in Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) is carved into a granite mountain face in a tranquil area covered with pine trees some 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Madrid.

At the site is a huge basilica which is 262 metres long (860 feet) and a Benedictine Abbey.

Towering over the complex is a 150-metre cross that weighs nearly 200,000 tonnes that can be seen from miles away.

Fresh flowers are placed on Franco’s tomb at the far end of the basilica, which also holds the remains of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Spain’s fascist Falange party who was killed at the start of the 1936-39 civil war.

Franco, whose Nationalist forces defeated the Republicans in the war, ordered the construction of the site in 1940, later calling it an attempt at “reconciliation” for all Spaniards.

He filled the basilica with the remains of some 33,000 dead from both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Franco’s rebellion against an elected Republican government.

The families of the fallen Republicans were never told that the remains of their loved ones had been transferred to the site.

A 2007 law passed under a previous Socialist government had already banned political gatherings at the Valley of the Fallen, where far-right groups used to attend an annual memorial mass on the anniversary of Franco’s death on November 20, 1975.

An expert commission set up by that government recommended the site be given a new significance.

It proposed setting up a permanent exhibition on the grounds of the monument dedicated to its history, the people buried there, and the estimated 20,000 political prisoners who took part in its construction.

But the Socialists lost power in 2011, and their successors, the conservative Popular Party (PP) chose to ignore the report, arguing that it was best not to open old wounds.

Since Sanchez’s Socialists returned to power last year, they have made the exhumation a priority and want to give the monument a new meaning, so it is no longer a place of apology for the Franco regime, without giving further details.