The first step was taken yesterday to opening a mass grave containing more than 30,000 bodies from both sides of the civil war.
More than a year after the remains of the fascist dictator General Franco were removed from the site, the Socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez announced that it had applied for permission to start exhumation work to identify “the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship who were buried in the crypts” of the Valley of the Fallen’s basilica.
The church, built into a mountain outside Madrid on a pharaonic scale, using forced labour, is Spain’s biggest mass grave. Franco originally intended it only to honour his own side, and himself above all others, but to give the impression of national reconciliation he also filled it with bodies of left-wing Republicans dug up secretly from mass graves. They had not died fighting in the war but were political prisoners executed by the fascist government.
The planned exhumations have prompted accusations from the right of political opportunism. The removal of Franco’s remains took place on the eve of the general election that returned Sánchez to power and the announcement of work to open the mass grave comes less than a month before a hotly contested Madrid regional election.
The work will be done at the request of 60 families whose relations were buried at the site and were mainly Republicans, but also some who fought on the dictator’s Nationalist side.
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Among the remains to be removed are those of Manuel and Antonio Lapeña, brothers shot by Franco’s troops in 1936. They were buried in Calatayud, but in 1959 they were exhumed and reburied in the Valley of the Fallen. Five years ago a court authorised their exhumation at the behest of their family.
The government project, for which €665,000 was approved last month, will include work to “access and strengthen the passage to the different levels of the crypts . . . and the adoption of measures to ensure structural security for the inspection of each crypt”.
The government wants to eject the Benedictine monks from the abbey that houses the mausoleum and turn it into a centre of historical memory.