To Lapeña, Franco is nothing but a “genocidal murderer and a criminal, like Hitler and other fascist leaders.” As a child, she remembers how her father, now 94, would remark every time Franco appeared on television: “That is the man that killed your grandfather.” In an interview, she described the valley as akin to a “Nazi monument”—“very cold, very dark,” with an aura of tragedy that had chilled her when she visited to observe the studies.

Like many, she believes the valley should be deconsecrated, its cross torn down and a museum placed there to put it in proper historical context. “All we want is that the history of Spain is known, [the history] that they have hidden or tried to erase,” she said.

Defenders of Franco—who some on both the left and right claim represent up to half the country, though there’s no good data and the true proportion is likely much smaller—reject comparisons with Hitler. They say Italy’s Mussolini is a fairer analogy, and accuse the “losers” of the civil war of trying to rewrite history. At the Francisco Franco Foundation in Madrid—an organization many would like to see shuttered—its president, retired General Juan Chicharro, painted the historical-memory drive as an attempt by the people he characterized as “socio-communists” now in power to bring back the republic defeated in 1939. “They are not trying to reconcile; they are trying to win a war they lost 80 years ago,” he told me.

Certainly, the rhetoric flying between Spain’s political foes is often startlingly reminiscent of the 1930s. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the Catalan independence crisis, where the specter of Franco figures large in the public discourse. Opponents exchange barbs like “traitor” and “fascist,” and the contention that the Spanish right—and by extension, until recently, the state—has never disavowed Francoist ideology features heavily in the Catalan separatist narrative. In turn, the Catalan question has also energized Spanish nationalists and the far right, giving new life to the rivalries of old and highlighting the gulf that still lingers between the so-called two Spains even now.

Read: How Spain misunderstood the Catalan independence movement

Argelia Queralt Jiménez, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona, said the exhumation of Franco and the historical-memory drive would help defuse the perception among Catalan separatists of Spain as “Francoland,” a country that had not fully abandoned dictatorship for democracy. In an interview, she said that perception had little basis in reality, but explained that the failure of the Spanish right to discuss the civil war and the subsequent regime had effectively “normalized” and justified that assault on the democratic order. Meanwhile, the story of one side—of the defeated—had been “silenced” and victims treated with “disdain,” Queralt said.