Monument to former dictator to be sent to museum

Spain's former dictator General Francisco Franco was finally knocked off his pedestal yesterday as workmen removed the last public monument to him on the mainland from a square in the northern port city of Santander. A huge bronze sculpture of the erstwhile caudillo sitting on a prancing horse has overseen traffic jams around the city's Plaza del Ayuntamiento for 44 years.

This morning workers arrived with blow torches, pneumatic drills and a crane to begin the task of carrying him off to a municipal warehouse.

The small crowd of onlookers included a handful of Franco supporters, who arrived with a bunch of flowers in memory of the man who ruled Spain for 36 years until his death in 1975.

One man tried to pin the flag of the Falange, a far-right party that backed Franco, on to the sculpture, which is spattered with red paint from protesters.

The order to remove the statue came from the mayor, Iñigo de la Serna, of the rightwing People's party. He said the general would be mothballed until he could be moved to a regional museum, which has yet to be built. The mayor provoked controversy, however, by ordering the removal of a plaque commemorating the Second Republic, which was overthrown by Franco and other rightwing generals when they sparked the Spanish civil war with an uprising in 1936.

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which lobbied for a recent law that banned Francoist symbols from public places, accused the mayor of placing the republic and Francoism on the same level.

"That was precisely the time when Spaniards were, for the first time, able to choose their mayors in democratic elections," they said.

As part of the same move to eradicate Francoist symbols, the Canary Island city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife today changed the name of one of its main streets from Rambla General Franco to Rambla de Santa Cruz. Other streets named after Francoist generals were also changed.

The Santander statue, already spattered with red paint by protesters, was the last public sculpture of Franco left in mainland Spain.

A smaller sculpture of Franco still stands in Spain's north African enclave at Melilla, where he gained military prominence as a young Spanish Legion officer. Officials there plan to send him to a military museum.