Franco’s Body Is Exhumed, as Spain Struggles to Confront the Past
The controversy surrounding the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum that housed Franco’s remains, has as much to do with its past as with its present.Photograph by J. J. Guillén / Getty
A year after the Spanish Civil War ended, in 1940, General Francisco Franco decreed that, to honor those who had died fighting for the nationalist cause, he would build a mausoleum possessed of “the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness.” The announcement was made before a distinguished audience, which included military officials and the German Ambassador to Spain, at the site where Franco had chosen to build: a valley of pines in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, on the outskirts of Madrid. The Valley of the Fallen, as it came to be known, was neither the first nor the last memorial to the victory of Franco’s forces, but none compared to its scale: a neoclassical basilica built of granite, adorned with statues, mosaics, and tapestries depicting heroes and martyrs, and Fascist emblems, set eight hundred feet into the mountainside, where it could remain forever.