| Spain's 'monstrosity' remembering Franco era
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The "Valle de los Caidos" (Valley of the Fallen) monument and mausoleum to the Spanish military dictator, the General Francisco Franco
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Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, an erstwhile prisoner of the regime of General Francisco Franco, still shudders at the thought of the "Valle de los Caidos" (Valley of the Fallen) monument and mausoleum to the Spanish military dictator, who died 30 years ago on Sunday.
Sanchez Albornoz, a historian, managed to escape from what would become Europe’s largest funereal monument and spent 20 years in Argentine exile.
He is now one of few surviving witnesses to the building of the monument on the outskirts of Madrid by anti-Franco prisoners whose forced labour built it.
As well as constructing the monument itself, some 30 kilometres outside the capital, the republican prisoners also had to build roads, bridges and railway lines in Franco’s Spain.
Sanchez Albornoz told AFP he remembered there were "three penitentiary detachments, a euphemism for concentration camps" whose inmates were drafted for the construction projects.
Now, the pro-Communist United Left opposition party and associations of Franco-era victims want to see the monument reconverted into a democratic "memorial."
A total of 500 prisoners "worked" on the job, according to Sanchez Albornoz, arrested in March 1948 aged just 21 when he was a student involved with the underground union movement.
"I was in a group constructing the monastery. The others were building the access road for the firm Banus, tough work which consisted of collecting stones 10 hours a day and using dynamite to hollow out a crypt," he recalls more than half a century on.
He was detained at the site from March to August 1948 - "the easiest months as it was spring" - before fleeing first to France and then Argentina.
Some 20,000 political prisoners were forced to work on the Valle de los Caidos site, according to journalist and writer Jordi Garci Soler.
Author Javier Rodrigo Sanchez calculates some 180,000 political prisoners spread across 72 concentration camps were used as "cheap labour, absolutely docile and completely reliable," between 1937, even before the 1936-39 Civil War ended, and 1970, five years before Franco’s death.
The site covers 120 hectares amid the Guadarrama mountain range. Work started in 1940 under the guide of architect Pedro Muguzura, before Diego Mendez oversaw their completion in the 1950s.
The giant monument consists of a basilica carved out of rock and a 262-metre crypt, an esplanade of 30,600 square metres and topping it all off a 150-metre high cross 46 metres wide which can be easily seen from the adjacent motorway across the valley.
In front of the altar inside are the tombs of Franco (1892-1975) and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936), the latter the founder of the Falange fascist movement.
The Spanish taxpayer finances the upkeep of Valle de los Caidos, which is a Spanish national heritage site.
Various political groups from the Left and from regional nationalist groups, have called for the site to be transformed into a Civil War memorial as the 30th anniversary of Franco’s death and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy two days later nears.
Sanchez Albornoz is not holding his breath in that regard.
"The government isn’t going to do it. First, they’s have to hand them (Franco’s remains) over to his family. They are the ones who should be the guardians (of his remains) and not the national heritage. Then, when the hole is empty we’ll think what to do," he reflects.
"No (other) 20th-century dictator has a state-financed monument to him in a country calling itself democratic. Not Mussolini, nor Hitler, nor Lenin, Stalin.
"All this Europeanisation, this harmonisation, the single currency, and then? Why don’t we harmonise that as well?" the historian asks.
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