Within two years, Spain’s socialist government plans to close the Benedictine monastery at the Civil War monument the Valley of the Fallen—and turn the site, with basilica and monastery, into an ‘interpretive center.’
The move comes, El Debate reports, as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez faces several major crises for his government—not least a corruption case touching on four government ministries and including additional accusations against his wife Begoña Gomez. To date, his government has made no official announcement on the issue of the monastery.
With important regional elections in both April and May, followed by EU elections in June, Spain is in the middle of a significant electoral campaign. The country’s political Left, particularly the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), has for the last 15 years used the specter of the Civil War (1936–1939) and the subsequent 40 years of dictatorship under conservative general Francisco Franco as a political tool, either to distract from other issues of the day or to rally its far-left flank at election time.
The Valley of the Fallen is a memorial to those who fought in the Civil War, built by Franco in the aftermath of the conflict. Under the basilica that is at the heart of the monument are buried some 30,000 soldiers from both sides of the war, as well as a monastery with a community of 21 Benedictine monks. Francisco Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange—a broadly fascist political party and one of the combatant factions in the war—were both originally buried there as well. Since the 1990s, forensic doctors and researchers have been identifying the bodies of the buried at the request of family members.
In his five years as Spanish premier, Sánchez has not only tightened the 2010 Democratic Memory Law that institutionalized a one-sided revisionist history of the war but also made specific moves on the Valley of the Fallen. Though still known widely as the Valley of the Fallen, it has officially been renamed by his government ‘The Valley of Cuelgamuros,’ the name of the valley before the memorial was built. In 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when Spain was under a tight lockdown, Sánchez had the body of Franco removed from the site. In April 2023, with little fanfare, the body of Primo de Rivera was removed. Both have been reburied in cemeteries in Madrid.
Sánchez made a media spectacle of a short, almost last-minute visit to the forensics lab under the basilica late last week. The government also announced that it will take measures against a regional law passed in Aragón last year meant to counteract the national Democratic Memory law.
But removing the monks from their monastery and the basilica won’t be easy. Not only do the monks not want to go but, according to El Debate, the arrangement that brought them there is an agreement directly with the Holy See that cannot be broken unilaterally even by the present government. For this reason, the news site explains, the government is giving itself time to forge a law it hopes can surmount the legal mountain it will need to conquer.