Spain has come a long way since the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975 and the final
transition to democracy in 1982. However, unlike other nations in Europe with pasts of
totalitarian regimes, large parts of Spanish society have consciously tried to forget it. To
understand this one must look to Spanish society’s divisions around the Civil war of 1935-39
which have never truly been reckoned with.
El Valle de Los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen) Spain’s monument for those who died in
the Civil War, is a peculiar place. As you drive up from el Escorial up the Valle de
Cuelgamuros, through the dense mountain conifers of the Sierra de Guadarrama, a giant
granite cross standing a hundred metres into the air appears, at its base a giant basilica cut
into the hillside. On arrival the car park is empty and weed ridden as are the pavilions, where
the flagstones laid down in front of the great basilica are slowly being covered by the dry
grasses of the Sierra. Once inside the great basilica two guardian angels, each almost a dozen
metres high, stare down upon you with their swords already unsheathed. As you walk deeper
into the basilica, water starts to drop on you, seeping from the rocky roof slowly and yet
irrepressibly.
What does this diversion to a damp slowly crumbling monument tell us about today’s Spain
you may ask? This edifice was at the heart of intense political wrangling and reckoning over
Spain’s history. Franco himself was buried there, in fact, when I visited El Valle de los
Caídos; his burial place by the altar was marked by a white stone with freshly place flowers
alongside it. At the bus stop closest to the monument stickers said, “A Franco no se mueva”,
Franco will not be moved. Franco’s body ultimately was moved but the fissures in Spanish
society the removal exposed are symptomatic of a far wider tension.
El Valle de los Caídos epitomizes the 20th century trauma Spain tries and fails to come to
terms with. El Partido Popular, Spain’s establishment centre right party, itself founded by
former ministers during Franco’s regime, recently had a spokeswoman call members of the
left-wing government ‘Communists’ and “sons of terrorists” in parliament. This is all while
the exhumation of mass graves continues, for instance, 11 republicans executed in cold blood
in a cemetery in Alicante in 1940. Spain’s dialogue with the past has a fundamental problem
as to how can one attempt to forget when all around Spain there are mass graves still to be
uncovered and many in society celebrating Franco and his regime.
Attempts to heal this wound sometimes momentarily soothe, but in an instant either side will
jolt in shock at the power of the past. A revision to the law of historical memory, passed in
2007 which would have banned some Francoist symbols was proposed in Catalunya.
Immediately the far-right Vox party condemned it. Vox railed against it whilst declaiming
supposed money stolen from Spaniards and sent to the USSR in the Civil war, as well as
murders they accused the leader of Catalonian Republicans of committing during the war.
Back in El Valle de Los Caídos, officially a monument to the dead of the civil war on both
sides, there are two antechambers on either side of the giant cupola. One is to civilians who
died in the conflict, another to priests killed by Republican forces. Although Republican
forces killed many priests the numbers of priests killed were far less than those civilians
killed by Franco’s armies and allies. The monument is thus keenly representative of the
Francoist narrative of the war. The monument of El Valle de los Caídos is like the rest of
Spain’s political discourse around the past – a contradiction. How can the El Valle de los
Caídos be a monument for the Civil War dead when with or without Franco’s tomb it is a
monument to his ideology of a Catholic Authoritarianism, which more than flirted with
Fascism? Spanish society knows this, whether it is those who laid flowers on Franco’s grave
or left-wing legislators who voted for his removal. If El Valle de los Caídos is the physical
representation of Spain’s pained wrangling with its past, then how can it be solved?
As it stands, time will eventually wear down and destroy the great basilica of El Valle de los
Caídos. However, the ideological battles and tension surrounding Spain’s past have a far less
certain future. Vox seems only strengthened by Spain’s battles with Catalunyan separatists.
They want to repeal the law of historical memory, reclaim Spain’s sovereignty, and restore
conservative values in society. They may not call themselves Francoists, however, when Vox
calls itself the voice of real Spain, it is a Spain which Franco would have been familiar with.
When Franco’s body was being reinterred after a brief helicopter ride from El Valle de los
Caídos to a cemetery in Madrid, his new tomb was blessed by the son of Antonio Tejero.
Tejero led a failed coup attempt in 1981 against the nascent Spanish democracy. On the 40th
anniversary of that failed coup Franco’s legacy still haunts Spain and with the rise of Vox his
ghost will stalk Spain for far further still.