Deep in a mountainside 40 miles outside Madrid, past a gift shop, a pair of immense, sword-wielding angels, and a tapestry of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in full rampage, lie the remains of Francisco Franco.

Fresh red and white carnations sit on top of the simple stone slab that marks the tomb of the fascist dictator. On the other side of the altar, similarly garlanded, lies José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falangist party.

Apart from a far-left militant bomb attack 18 years ago that destroyed a few confessionals and pews, the pair’s long occupancy of the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen has been peaceful, if enduringly controversial.

However, El Caudillo’s time in the cavernous mausoleum could be coming to an end. On Thursday, Spanish MPs approved a symbolic resolution to exhume Franco from his tomb and have him re-interred elsewhere.

Franco’s tomb. Photograph: Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP

The non-binding proposal, put forward by the Socialist party (PSOE), argued that the monument honours the victors of the Spanish civil war rather than the victims.

Although the memorial – partly built by captured republicans and political prisoners – is officially meant to commemorate the estimated 500,000 people killed during the conflict, Franco and Primo de Rivera rest in the only two visible tombs.

You should leave the dead where they are Ramón Mateo

The site, surmounted by a 150-metre-high cross, is also a mass grave containing the bodies of more than 30,000 people from both sides of the war.

According to the PSOE, the valley needs to be transformed “so it ceases to be a place of Francoist and national-Catholic memory and is remade as a space for the culture of reconciliation and collective democratic memory, where the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship are recognised and treated with dignity”.



To that end, they say, Franco’s remains need to be removed. Those of Primo de Rivera, however, could be allowed to stay if they are moved to a less prominent position in the basilica as he, unlike Franco, died during the civil war.

The proposals are based on the conclusions of an expert committee appointed six years ago by the PSOE government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.



The Socialists also want to see the creation of a truth commission, funding to be stopped to groups promoting or defending Franco, and the introduction of a DNA database to help identify the disappeared.

Thursday’s vote, which has no legal weight, was passed by 198 votes to one after 140 MPs from the ruling conservative People’s party (PP) and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) party abstained.

Rightwing falangists and Franco supporters at the Valley of the Fallen in 2006. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP

The PP is opposed to the Law of Historical Memory introduced by the Zapatero administration 10 years ago in an attempt to help Spain come to terms with its past. Having shelved the expert committee’s recommendations for six years, the PP is unlikely to rush to heed them now, even after the parliamentary vote.

Today, almost 60 years after it was completed, the Valley of the Fallen is a tourist attraction, a place of pilgrimage for those still nostalgic for the Franco era, and a reminder of the “pact of forgetting” that brought Spain back to democracy.

Watched over by the huge Pietà above the basilica’s entrance, a gang of French schoolchildren shout and joke while lizards flicker across the paving stones.

Inside the church, about a hundred faithful sightseers and locals gather for the 11am sung mass as the smoke from a censer rises around the gnarled crucifix above the altar.

Ramón Mateo, a 68-year-old from Madrid visiting the monument, is one of the many Spaniards of his generation who feel the past is best left where it is – buried, silent.

“I think they should leave Franco where he is,” he says, pointing towards the basilica. “He’s been dead for a long time and you should leave the dead where they are.”

Both England and the US got over their civil wars, he says. So why shouldn’t Spain?



“If you don’t live in the present, you end up back in the past.”

Others disagree. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, now 91, was one of the political prisoners forced to work on the Valley of the Fallen. He welcomes the proposal but says it is more than a little late.

Hitler and Mussolini have disappeared, yet in Spain it’s normal to have the tomb of someone of the same stripe Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz

“The same resolution could have been passed many years ago. For me, it’s shameful that the monument’s still there. It’s shameful for me as a Spaniard and for the victims of Francoism … Hitler and Mussolini have disappeared from Europe, yet in Spain it’s seen as normal to have the tomb of someone of the same stripe. It’s high time for this.”

Sánchez-Albornoz managed to escape the labour camp but for him, the Valley of the Fallen will always remain a grandiloquent witness to the brutality of the Franco era.

“When I was a prisoner there in 1948, there were some others who had been captive since the end of the war in 1939,” he says. “They hadn’t seen the outside world for nine years. That was proof of the cruelty – that and forcing them to work on what would become the tomb.”

And besides, he adds: “From an aesthetic point of view, it’s grotesque.”

