When was Franco moved from the Valley of the Fallen?
Franco is moved from the Valley of the Fallen
La exhumación de Franco
24 October 2019. For 44 years Franco lay in the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid, a monument built between 1940 and 1958, partly by political prisoners,…
Where: Spain, Madrid
What happened
For 44 years Franco lay in the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid, a monument built between 1940 and 1958, partly by political prisoners, where some 33,800 dead from both sides of the war are buried, some moved there without their families' knowledge. On 24 October 2019, after the Supreme Court rejected his family's appeals, the government exhumed him and reburied him in the cemetery of Mingorrubio, at El Pardo. The Democratic Memory Law of 2022 renamed the site the Valley of Cuelgamuros, and families have since begun to recover remains from its crypts. What to do with the monument still divides Spain.
Say it
En 2019 sacaron los restos de Franco del Valle de los Caídos.
In 2019 Franco's remains were taken out of the Valley of the Fallen.
Why it matters
The exhumation was the moment democratic Spain decided a dictator could not lie in a state monument, and it reopened the argument, forty years after the Transition's silence, about graves, names and memory that Latin America had gone through a generation earlier.
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Connected
- The Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936–1 April 1939)
- The Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936–1 April 1939)
- Franco dies and the Transition begins (20 November 1975–15 June 1977)
- The dictatorship and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (30 April 1977–10 December 1983)
- Spain joins the European Community (1 January 1986)
- Spain joins the European Community (1 January 1986)