Calls to move Franco's grave
Updated on 29 October 2009
Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, 83, was among the thousands of prisoners who helped build General Franco's giant monument to nationalists killed during the Spanish civil war.
His time in the labour camp there, in a valley in the hills 30 miles outside of Madrid, helped build one of the largest stone crucifixes in the world, a monastery and an enormous basilica built inside a hollowed-out mountain, where General Francisco Franco's body now lies.
When Franco died in 1975, the interim government decided to bury the dictator at El Valle de los Caidos, or the Valley of the Fallen, where he stills lies today, his grave maintained at the cost of the Spanish taxpayer.
But Nicolas says that is an insult. Franco must now be disinterred and his body given to his wealthy family for private burial, he says.
"I don't see any sense that after 30 years of democracy and being part of Europe there is a monument for a dictator that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in Spain and that has been using political prisoners for performing all kinds of works and particularly for building the monument where he is buried. It's a nonsense."
"I don't find in Europe any monument for Hitler, or for Mussolini, or even presently in Serbia for Karadzic. Karadzic is in the Hague where Franco should have been sent if the Allies had done their work at that time."
His is one of a growing number of voices in Spain that is calling for Franco to be exhumed and reburied, not at the cost of the taxpayer, but at the cost of the Franco family. On Wednesday, experts began excavations at the presumed grave of executed poet and figurehead of the Spanish left, Federico García Lorca. It is an issue which has caused intense media interest in Spain, with Lorca's descendants complaining of a "media circus".
The dig itself is being held in secret, but the issues around it are being discussed more openly than ever before. And so the voices calling for the removal of Franco from the Valley of the Fallen are now growing louder and greater in number.
In 2007, the Socialist government passed the historic memory law, which confronted Spain's authoritarian past head-on. It led, most visibly, to the removal of most of the statues and monuments in the country's towns and cities dedicated to "El Caudillo". For the next two years various structures were torn down, often watched by an audience of Franco supporters giving fascist salutes. The last was removed in Santander on 18 December last year.
This process has raised difficult questions about how a country deals with the darker issues of its past. "In the Spanish society still today we are afraid to touch the Franco questions," says campaigner Emilio Silva. "If you go to small villages there are a lot of people who do not want to talk," he says. But he is committed to making Spain confront those questions, which he believes is the only way to move forward.
But many are reluctant to talk about the issue. Many Spaniards told us off the record about their opinions on what should be done with Franco's body, but few would speak on camera. It remains a very sensitive issue in Spain, and one about which people have strong views.
"Removing bodies that belong to history, as can be said of Franco's in the Valley of the Fallen, would create more problems than it would solve," says Jesús García Calero, the culture editor of ABC newspaper. "It would stir up more bad feeling than those it would clear up. And so I'm not sure that with this balance we would end up winning. Probably not."
