Spain’s return to democracy included a 1977 law of amnesty for crimes committed during the civil war and the ensuing dictatorship. (Franco rose to power during the civil war, ruling over Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975.)

In Barcelona, however, Ms. Colau is also scrutinizing the officialdom of the Franco government. This month, her administration briefly removed an inscription from a statue within Barcelona City Hall that was dedicated to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former president of the International Olympic Committee. However, opposition parties eventually forced Ms. Colau to restore the mention on the statue.

Mr. Samaranch was widely credited with bringing the Summer Games to Barcelona in 1992, helping transform the city into Spain’s main tourism hub. But he had been an official in the Franco government.

“I can’t stop anybody who looks into my father’s past and interprets his career one way or another,” said Juan Antonio Samaranch, a financier who has followed in his father’s footsteps to become vice president of the International Olympic Committee. “There are people who find him marvelous and others who find him bad or not respectable.”

Some Catalan separatists said that though they would have wanted the Franco statue exhibited elsewhere, they welcomed the opportunity to consider how Catalonia has evolved since the dictatorship and what further changes should be made.

“I walked past the statue, looked at Franco without his head, saw the large Catalan flag flying behind him, and it felt good to think that, while Franco is no longer, we are very much here,” said Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, a former separatist politician who now serves as chairman of the department of social diversity at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Yet some major symbols of Franco’s regime survive even within independence-minded Catalonia. In May, residents of Tortosa, in southern Catalonia, voted to keep a giant Franco monument that stands in the middle of the river that crosses the city and was inaugurated by Franco to mark the 25th anniversary of his victory in the Battle of the Ebro, one of the bloodiest in the civil war.