Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz recalls Cuelgamuros and the myth surrounding the Valley of the Fallen
Many look at the concrete and granite contours of the Valley of the Fallen and see a mass grave masquerading as a memorial; a fascist temple that continues to exalt Gen Francisco Franco and his 36-year dictatorship.
Others claim the basilica and its enormous cross are a genuine monument to national reconciliation intended to honour all the civil war dead.
Then there are those who view it as a haunted bunker still roiled with the ghosts of Spain’s dictatorial past. The socialist government, they say, should drop its plans to exhume Franco from his crypt in the valley and leave the past in the past.
Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, 92, a historian, has his own thoughts on the site, which he always refers to as Cuelgamuros, after the valley where it was built. For him, the Valley of the Fallen is a monumental fiction.
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More bodies were needed after the Franco regime decided to rethink the basilica and pass it off as a shrine to both nationalist and republican dead. And so thousands of corpses were exhumed from cemeteries and graves across Spain, often without permission from the families. “People say there are fighters from both sides buried there, but that’s not true,” says Sánchez-Albornoz. Most of the republicans interred in the Valley were people who had been put up against walls and shot, he says. “There are fighters from an army that rose up – and there are people who were shot, who were victims. They were victims. It’s a fiction that they wanted it to be a Valley of the Fallen.” Ultimately, he says, there is “no parity between the two groups of people buried there”.
