“Exclusive: Photograph of the remains of Franco,” a Twitter user posted in late August. It was a joke: The accompanying picture showed not the dusty bones of Spain’s former dictator, but a portrait of the current king, Felipe VI.

Before dying, in 1975, Francisco Franco anointed Felipe’s father, Juan Carlos, to lead the country and keep in place his authoritarian, quasi-fascist “National Catholic” ideology. Instead, the new monarch led Spain into a process of express-speed modernization, helping create a modern parliamentary democracy. Yet four decades on, that transition still feels incomplete to many Spaniards—and nowhere is that more apparent than in the debate over what to do with the former dictator’s remains.

Last Thursday, Spain’s congress approved a motion to move Francisco Franco from his resting place, a war memorial known as the Valley of the Fallen. “Today our democracy is better,” said Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose government had presented the initiative. His deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo, said the exhumation should take place for “ethical reasons” and be driven by “democratic values.”

The Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum built into the side of a mountain under Franco’s aegis to commemorate the dead in the 1936-39 Civil War he won, is one of the world’s biggest mass graves. Over 33,000 remains of war casualties were brought there on the completion of the monument in 1959, often without the consent of their families. The monument’s huge scale, history and panoramic views make it a popular tourist attraction. But its Francoist symbolism also makes it a place of pilgrimage for the far right.

Throughout the four decades of Spanish democracy, the Valley of the Fallen has been the single biggest reminder of the country’s divisive leader—a massive open sore. And that it has taken this long to address points to something Westerners outside of Spain often forget: just how new and fragile Spanish democracy has been in the past few decades.