Fifty years since Franco: Spain, the valley and a troubled legacy

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0:44This is a documentary from the BBC World Service, this week from Spain, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. I'm Linda Presley with Assignment. We're driving up the road to what was once known as Valle de los Caídos, Valley of the Falling. that's now renamed as Valle de Cuelgamuros. This pine tree side of the road we've seen there. It's a very cloudy day. This road was badly built by political prisoners right after the Spanish Civil War. That's the BBC's producer in Spain, Esperanza Escribano. We're an hour's drive north-west of Madrid and we're climbing towards the monument Franco began building in 1940.

1:34The civil war had just ended, a bloody conflict triggered by Franco's military coup against Spain's elected republican government. For many, the valley, that includes a basilica or church, represents his nationalist victory in the war. This is Esperanza's first visit here. Wow, as a Spanish person, I knew about this place. But what I didn't know is the dimension of it. It's just massive. There's this huge explanade, then this grey stone arcade built around the foot of the rocky hill. In the middle, there's the entrance to the basilica, tunneled through the hill. And on top of it, the largest cross in the world, stretching 150 metres into the sky.

2:27In this week's assignment, we're exploring the symbolism and future of the valley. Was it a place of reconciliation between Spain's once-warring factions, as some claim? Spain's socialist government doesn't think so, and it's embarked on an ambitious project to redefine the site.

2:48Some history. After winning the civil war, Francisco Franco ruled Spain with absolute power. Thousands of republicans were executed, many more went into exile. During his 36 years as head of state, political parties were banned, censorship was universal, and the government stuck to an ultra-conservative Catholic ideology. Franco's valley of the fallen would take two decades to build. Around 20 ,000 political prisoners labored in its construction, and once Franco tightened his authoritarian grip, any dissent could be punished with imprisonment here. Here you have the picture of the three concentration camps.

3:34Nicolás Sánchez Alborno was a student activist against the dictatorship. He's 99 now, and when we meet in his flat in Madrid, he's at pains to point out that the camps he and his fellow internees stayed in were not death camps like those of the Nazis. Something much more subtle. This is the monastery. This is the hole. The hole in the rock. Okay. Can you see? Oh, wow. The very first tunnel through the morning. And this is the concentration camp that built a road and so on. So this is before the cross is built. And this is the base of the cross. In 1947, Nicolás was picked up by the authorities.

4:22I was in the university and the police ordered that we'll be hailed and I interrogated and then got before a military court. Well, they condemned us to several years of prison and finally we were sent to Quelgamuros. Nicolás always uses the original name of the valley, Cuelga Muros, refusing to give it the name used by Franco. When the camp commanders realised Nicolás was a student, he was spared heavy construction work and assigned to the office. There was a tremendous amount of bureaucracy. And what about the conditions for the political prisoners there? What about the food? Well, one of the tasks of the paperwork was to build a standard calorie menu, but we never saw the food.

5:19It was theoretical. And what happened to the food? Black market. So this was corruption? Totally. In 1948, Nicolas forged a daring escape plan. With another detainee and the help of two American women in a tiny Renault car, one of them the sister of the American writer Norman Mailer, Nicolas made it to France and went into exile. Whilst we're recording assignment, we stay in the on-site guest house in the valley, opposite the monastery. In the 50 years since Franco died, there probably isn't too much that's different. The rooms are painted white with a wooden cross on the wall. The bathrooms hark back to the 1970s, and wine bottles still carry illustrations of the dictator's shield.

6:09But inside the basilica, as a result of the socialist government's determination to transform the narrative of what the valley represents, momentous changes began in 2019. We are standing behind the altar, and under this black marble, Franco was buried after he died in November 1975. Then he was exhumed in October 2019, but there is no time that Franco was buried here for such a long time. There is no, there's nothing. You couldn't tell he was here.

6:47Felix Polanos is both Spain's minister of the presidency and of justice. He's pushing the government's agenda on the valley. It had to start with something simple, he tells us. Spain couldn't have a place that honours the dictator, which is why Franco's remains were exhumed. On that day in 2019, more than four decades after he died in a hospital bed, the cameras clicked and whirred as Francisco Franco's coffin was borne out of the basilica on the shoulders of members of his family who tried to stop this ever happening. Then a helicopter carrying the casket rose up over the valley's colossal cross and made its way to the cemetery where Franco's wife already lay.

7:32Félix Bolaños denies the removal of Franco's body was political revenge, as some have claimed. It was an act of democracy, of values, of Europeanism, of modernity, of Spain that put the dictator in his place, he says. With Franco's remains gone from the valley, the government framed its democratic memory law of 2022. This ruled the monument would be known by its original name, Gualgamuros, where acts of glorification of the civil war and the dictatorship were prohibited. To proceed with its plan for the site, which include a new museum explaining the history of the valley, the government began negotiating with the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Spain.

8:16We have no problem with this being a place of worship, but there shouldn't be any element that honours Francoism. This meant one of the leaders of the Benedictines, who was openly Francoist, couldn't stay. The prior of the Benedictine community. For us, it was essential he'd leave the valley. Santiago Cantera departed earlier this year. He'd vehemently opposed the exhumation of Franco. We tried to contact him. He's apparently on a religious retreat, but had no reply to messages we left through those who know him. So who is Santiago Cantera? He's a monk who entered the monastery at Cuelgamuros after being a candidate for the Falange, the fascist party, in two elections in the 1990s, we're told by Jesús Bastante, a journalist and authority on religion.

9:13He was not elected, and after that he took holy orders. so the valley became a place where the children and grandchildren of those who'd governed during Franco's era would gather. There were meetings in the guesthouse, groups that today lead the Spanish far right. Not just the political party VOX, but VOX satellites well known in the Catholic sphere. Jesus Bastanti says both church and state compromised in discussions about the future of the valley of Guagamoros. The church agreed Santiago Cantera would leave, and it recognised the government's plan to redefine the valley. In left-wing circles there was talk of the deconsecration of the basilica and the en masse eviction of the Benedictines.

9:56But in the end, the government accepted the monks could stay and the valley remain a religious place.

10:11As a Benedictine monk, we come together in the chapel seven times a day to sing Gregorian chant. For me, it's the language I use to communicate with God. It speaks directly to the soul. Miguel Torres Montoro has spent 14 years at the monastery in the valley of Cualgamoros, and he's the director of the choir school, La Escolanía de la Santa Cruz. It has 33 students and we're invited to record the boys in rehearsal.

10:41If the Benedictines had been forced to leave the valley and the school closed, something unique would have gone. We're the only school in Spain, and I'd say the world, where the boys sing mass daily in Gregorian chant. And because of that, the level of expertise we have is enviable. There's been uncertainty about the site. How did that impact the Benedictines and the school and your students?

11:12We live calmly, with hope, looking towards the future. We're not thinking about whether we might have to live here. At no point have I felt uncertain. And what about the agreement that was made between the government and the Vatican and the Catholic Church here in Spain? The prior of the Benedictines, Santiago Cantera, he had to go. Was that a sad day here for the Benedictines? Well, I don't feel I can answer that, he tells us.

11:48At break time, the boys play football in a central quadrangle, a welcome burst of unbridled energy given the solemnity that dominates the valley of Cuelgamuros. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

12:32Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Linda Presley with Esperanza Escribano this week on Assignment in Spain We've driven northwest about 100 kilometers from El Valle de Cuelgamuros to the village of Aldeaseca It's a small village with maybe 200, 300 people and it's also close to the city of Salamanca which at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was the de facto headquarters of Franco's nationalist troops. We meet Juan Luis González Robledo outside the village on the main road where there's a shallow ditch.

13:22We are 50, 100 metres away from the place where they were killed. On the 20th of August 1936, Juan Luis's grandfather, Román González Enríquez, together with five men and one woman, were shot dead by Falangists, Spanish fascists, who supported Franco's revolt against Republican Spain. The day after, a neighbour saw the bodies and he carried them into his mule cart and he took them to the other side of the road where there was a dry well and he put the bodies there. We head over there. In Spain, there were also mass graves of nationalist, Franco-supporting victims killed by Republican forces during the Civil War.

14:12But they are fewer and often better documented. Here in Aldioseca, the seven who were executed were brought from their village 30 kilometres away. Juan Luis's grandfather was targeted because he was the deputy mayor. Others were members of the Socialist Party. So we think we've arrived more or less at the place, and now it's in a cut grain field. We can see the church tower of the village just to our right. It was in 2003 that Juan Luis and the other families began to look for their dead. They worked with a mechanical digger and an archaeologist. He started to find little bones, a piece of a cranium, and a longer bone than we thought it was a leg bone.

14:57But these were not complete skeletons? No, no, no. When we saw that, it was the proof, the evidence of what we have heard, rumours, that talk about a lot of bodies being transferred. So where had the remains of Juan Luis's grandfather and the others been taken? You've probably already guessed. to Franco's Valley of the Fallen without the knowledge or consent of family members. In 1959, the government sent an order to all of the regions that asked them to tell them where the masquerade were. And then, is there anything about who came here and took the bodies of your grandfather and the others? No.

15:48We heard other stories about the subterfuge used by the government to keep a village busy while a mass grave was emptied into boxes filled with jumbled bones and then transported to the crypts of the Valley of the Fallen. In one pueblo, the authorities organised an outdoor movie night so everyone was occupied whilst the grave robbers did their work. It's this part of the story that Esperanza and I have found really quite difficult to understand, that Francisco Franco would take people from these mass graves to put into the valley. As every dictator, he had to have his megalomaniac monument, and after he did this gigantic monument, he found out that the families of the soldiers that were in the nationalist side They didn't want to transfer them to that monument.

16:47So he had these enormous crypts with no one in them. So he decided to fill them with the bodies of the Republicans. Once Juan Luis and the others had confirmation their loved ones were in the crypt of the valley, they applied to exhume them. A catalogue of delays followed, hold-ups in the courts, opposition from political groups, and the local council of San Lorenzo de Escurial dragged its feet about giving technical permission. We contacted the council, where Spain's conservative party, the Partido Popular, is in power. A press officer told us no one talks about the valley of Cuergamoros, not even to the BBC.

17:26Finally, the exhumation went ahead. The boxes of bones were located in the crypt of the Basilica and the DNA tests completed. Twenty years after those tiny fragments of human material were found in that field, and 87 years after they were killed, the remains of Juan Luis's grandfather and the others were returned for a ceremony in their home village in August 2023.

18:08So this is one of the chapels that is the entrance to one of the two crypts where 33 ,000 people is believed to be buried here. We refused permission to visit the crypts in the valley of Cualgamuros, but Silvia Navarro has been inside. The atmosphere is, like, very oppressive and you are smelling like death, OK? Concentrated. It's like a horrible place. Somehow I feel my relative does not belong to this horrible place, OK? We meet Silvia and her sister Carmen in Madrid. The bones of their great uncle, José Antonio Marco Viedma, are in the crypt. From the village of Calatayud in northeast Spain, José Antonio supported workers' rights and was a Freemason, a group persecuted by Franco because he believed Freemasonry was part of an international conspiracy to destroy Spain.

19:09On the 2nd of September 1936, Jose Antonio was killed by phalangists, Spanish fascists. When Sylvia began the search for his remains in 2007, she got permission to visit the Valley's library. After I passed the security arc, I was surrounded by four people who came with me into the library and sat next to me for hours. Four people watching me all the time as if I was a burglar or I don't know what. I got the records so I saw that 81 remains had been transported to the Valley of the Fallen on the 8th of April of 1959 and it said the place that they'd come from so it said that Calatalu was there as the place and from many other places there are three books, three big huge books which contain the records from whole Spain almost every region.

20:10Silvia and Carmen have another theory about why Franco wanted Republican remains placed in the valley. After World War II, Spain's ally Hitler was gone. And in the 1950s Cold War years, Franco's international isolation was ending. He was like pushing towards an alliance with the USA and so on. And he had to show that he also accepted his enemies. So maybe it was a way of selling the idea that he was working towards a reconciliation, since you would find then remains of republicans and nationalists in the valley. What frustrates Silvia and Carmen is that they know some of the boxes from Calatayud were taken out of the crypt in the basilica in 2023, along with those of Juan Luis's grandfather.

21:06The sister's mother, who's in her 80s and waiting for news of her dead uncle, has already given a DNA sample to see if there's a match. We've been waiting for two years for the DNA tests and we have no news. But so the six boxes, where are they? In the lab. Yeah, they're in the lab. The government has a lot of excuses for us. The remains are in a bad condition. The labour is very difficult. Yeah, but meanwhile, they give 31 million euros for the Valley of the Fallen. So this is the money that's going to be spent on a new museum or some kind of explanation. And what about us? What about those human remains there?

21:53What are you going to do with that? The 31 million euro flagship plan for the government's redefinition of what the Valley of Cuelga Muros represents is a new museum. Here's Spain's Minister for Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres. It's important that Spain invests in this so that the history is known and not repeated. Sites of other atrocities, like the Nazi extermination camps or the centre of torture in Buenos Aires, are visited by students so they understand what happened. And he denied resources to fund exhumations in the valley are limited. The problem is that a lot of time has passed, the relatives are dying, and it's difficult to identify people from those remains.

22:41Sometimes nationalist families have objected to exhumations, not wanting their own loved ones in the valley to be disturbed. Of the more than 33 ,000 people buried there, the majority are from the nationalist side. Around 7 ,000 are republican remains. One of the arguments used by those against the government making any changes at the valley is that it's already a place of reconciliation. The minister doesn't believe that. Just look at the way the bodies arrived at the crypts, he says. The remains of those from the victorious Franco side were brought in individual coffins, and their families were notified.

23:20In contrast, the remains of Republicans were taken from mass graves, mixed together in boxes of 10 or 12 people, and their families were not informed. So this is the cemetery of Mingorubios that we've arrived at, just outside Madrid. We're here to meet the great-grandson of Spain's dictator, who's also named Francisco Franco. He's waiting for us outside the large vault covered in flowers, pictures, flags and religious iconography where Franco now lies with his wife after he was disinterred from the valley of Cualgamuros. I just ran into this family that came from Valencia to pay homage and just to visit.

24:05A constant stream of people arrive to take photos. I ask Franco's great-grandson what he thinks about the government's policy of re-designating the valley of Cuelga Moros. I believe those plans are going to be vengeful and one-sided. They want to redefine it, but again, who are they to redefine it? It's a temple of cult and worship. That's all it is. But it was a monument that was built for victory from one side over the other, wasn't it? Not necessarily. It basically holds the bodies of, I believe, 33 ,700 fallen. And these are remains that were left in mass graves in the middle of battlefields and they had no proper sepulcher.

24:45Burial. So him as a Christian that he was, so he thought it was a way of honoring and giving proper sepulcher to all the fallen, no matter what side you were from. But it seems that this was done clandestinely by your great-grandfather. Why would he do that? What is the alternative? Is it leaving them out in the field? A better option? It was known who those people were in those mass graves a lot of times in villages. We're talking about a post-war Spain. Obviously, resources were short. We're talking about a very different civilization to nowadays. But do you think that those families have the right to try and find their loved ones and identify them and take them home?

25:22Absolutely. I have nothing against that. And what do you say to those who say that it's just not appropriate to have a fascist monument in Spain in the 21st century that isn't properly explained? There's fascist monuments everywhere, as there are communist monuments everywhere. Would you consider all his public hospitals fascist monuments? But it is built to the glory of Franco and to the glory of the victorious in the Spanish Civil War. So that's slightly different to a hospital, isn't it? Well, I can't talk to what people feel. People can feel all kinds of feelings, but it was always meant to be for reconciliation.

26:02For everybody, for all Spain. For everybody, for all Spain, of course. And do you think there's going to be a lot of people appearing here on the 20th of November? It's not a congregation like it was back in the days of the Valle de los Caídos, but sure, there will be people here. And how do you feel when people come here and they do a fascist salute? I can't censor anybody from doing anything. Are you uncomfortable with that though? I'm not very comfortable with it, no.

26:29Many Spanish people, and not just those on the political right, think the valley of Gualgamoros should be preserved as it is. For younger generations, the bloody inheritance of Spain's civil war is diluted. What about for those who lived its violent aftermath? Remember Nicolas, the prisoner who escaped the valley in 1948? He lived in exile, only returning to Spain in the 1990s. What does he think should happen to the valley of Cuergamoros, once known as the Valley of the Fallen? I'm hoping that nature will take care of that. Some tremor or something at that point that will bring it down. So like an earthquake or something?

27:11Not tremors or anything. So you would like Cualgamuros to disappear? Erased. So what do you think the monument represents? Because there's people who think it's a monument to reconciliation. By no means. By no means.

27:34In this 50th anniversary year of the death of Francisco Franco, the Valley of Cuelgamuros remains emblematic of Spain's political and social divisions.

27:48That's all from assignment. It was expertly mixed by James Beard. Penny Murphy is the editor. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.