Just days after the Nationalist victory ended the Spanish Civil War in 1939, plans were approved for the construction of a colossal monument known as the Valley of the Fallen, envisioned as a resting place for the Nationalist soldiers killed fighting for “God and for Spain. ” Built within the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range on the outskirts of Madrid, the monument features an imposing basilica carved beneath a towering Christian cross. Francisco Franco, leader of the Nationalist forces and later dictator of Spain until 1975, officially opened the site in April 1959, twenty years after construction began. At the inauguration, he proclaimed: “Our war was clearly not another civil conflict but a true Crusade.
Never in our Fatherland were such great examples of heroism and saintliness offered up in such a short space of time. We would have to go back to the Roman persecution of the Christians to find anything similar. ” He added that it was “too great was the cost to Spain of that glorious campaign for our Liberation for it to be forgotten. ”
Franco also declared that while “anti-Spain was beaten and defeated, she is not dead.
” That phrase referred to the fragmented Republican forces initially loyal to the elected Popular Front government, whose response to the military coup of July 1936 had been insufficient to halt the insurrection, leading to a bloody three-year civil war. On the same day as the monument’s official opening, the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, the avowedly fascist group that fought alongside the Nationalists, were ceremoniously reinterred near the high altar of the basilica, cementing the valley as a site of Nationalist triumph. By 1958, amid efforts to reimagine the valley as a place of national reconciliation, nearly 8,000 Republican corpses were exhumed from mass graves across the country without the permission of the dead’s families and deposited within the monument. Historians have described this as condemning the dead to a “double death”: first in battle, then in memory.
The body of the dictator himself would later complete the so-called true Crusade. Today, the Valley of the Fallen stands as a paradoxical symbol of both Nationalist victory and Republican victimhood, memory and dismemory, monument and mass grave. The fragile Spain that Franco inherited in 1939 was forged in a crucible of civil war. Deepening social discontent and frustration with the Popular Front government, especially in military circles, culminated in a right-wing military coup among Spanish Armed Forces stationed in Morocco and the Canary Islands on July 17, 1936.
The insurrection spread to the Spanish mainland a day later through rural garrison uprisings that stifled the Republican government’s ability to organize immediate resistance but failed to take control of the entire country, which had been the insurgents’ initial objective. Spain’s Popular Front coalition was the product of an electoral pact among the majority of the Spanish left. While the apolitical anarchist and trade unionist CNT opposed direct involvement in the coalition, the CNT’s base still voted largely for the Popular Front. The alliance, which prevailed in the February 1936 elections, comprised the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the Republican Left, the Republican Union, and the Communist Party of Spain.
The electoral pact’s main aim was to protect the liberal and often anti-Church reforms enacted by the Second Spanish Republic’s first government, which led the country from 1931 to 1933 following the collapse of Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and the deposition of King Alfonso XIII. Under that government, Catholic churches were set ablaze, and religious congregations still standing were taxed heavily and prohibited from involvement in trade, industry, and education. The violence and civil unrest under the first Republican government helped the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, known as the CEDA, win the 1933 elections. Despite the victory, the CEDA was blocked from forming a government and denied cabinet positions for nearly a year.
The right’s electoral triumph triggered a general strike backed by the Socialist Workers’ Party and the UGT trade unionists. A year later, when three right-wing ministers finally took office, a countrywide revolt broke out. The uprising in the small mining region of Asturias was the most successful, lasting two weeks from October 4 to 19 before being crushed by 20,000 mobilized troops, many of whom served in the infamous Army of Africa. Spain’s Army of Africa was the field army stationed in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, which lasted from 1912 until Moroccan independence in 1956.
Spain’s colonial claim to Morocco arose from the belief that if the country failed to participate in Europe’s partition of Africa, it would be left behind diplomatically and politically. Having just lost its Latin American colonies and the Philippines, Spain saw the occupation of Morocco as a path to national renewal. In a treaty signed in 1900, France and Spain agreed to occupy separate zones of influence in Morocco. After World War I ended in 1918, a coalition of Rifian tribes headed by Abd el-Krim launched a major revolt against the French and Spanish protectorates.
More than 13,000 Spanish soldiers were killed in a single month-long battle. The breakaway state known as the Republic of the Rif existed only as long as the war between Spain and the Rifian tribes lasted, from 1921 until 1926, when it was suppressed by a joint Franco-Spanish expedition. It was a particularly violent environment for Spanish soldiers to learn the ways of war. The fighting forces of Spain’s colonial ventures were known as the Africanists.
Academics Balfour and La Porte wrote that the Africanists “shared a common core of nationalist and conservative values. Their long service in the Army of Africa, their lack of contact with the mainland, and the iniquity of the wars had turned them into an elite of officers alienated from civilian politics at home and imbued with a strong sense of mission to redeem Spain from division and disorder. ” It was a brutalizing experience; on the Moroccan battlefields, the Spaniards were reportedly told to show no mercy. Like Francisco Franco, many Africanists who began their military careers in the Rif War would go on to hold powerful positions in the 20th-century Spanish state.
Franco was born on December 4, 1892, into an upper-middle-class military family and was just 15 when he joined the Spanish Army as a cadet. The Franco family had strong ties to the military, having served in the Spanish Navy for six uninterrupted generations. Franco’s father, Nicolás, who became a vice admiral, abandoned the family a year before Franco joined the army and married another woman in Madrid after relocating there on a naval reassignment. Franco’s mother, María, wore widow’s black for the rest of her life.
Franco graduated as a second lieutenant in 1910, ranking a modest 251 out of 312 cadets in his class. He was soon stationed in Morocco amid the establishment of Spain’s protectorate. In 1916 at age 23, the captain was shot in the stomach during an assault against Moroccan troops. The wound was so severe that he was not expected to survive, and his eventual recovery seemed to him a divine blessing.
Franco later wrote: “My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force. Without Africa I can scarcely explain myself to myself, nor can I explain myself to my comrades in arms. ”
Franco married Carmen Polo in 1923, and three years later, the same year he became a general, she gave birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter named María del Carmen. In January 1936, another general election was called in Spain, and the leftist Popular Front coalition claimed victory.
Within a day and a half of the election, 16 people were killed, 39 were injured in riots, and at least 50 churches were set ablaze. A coup was proposed among monarchists, and the head of the CEDA, José María Gil-Robles, asked the prime minister to declare a state of war. Franco himself suggested that martial law be declared and the army mobilized, fearing reprisals from right-wing military men. One of the Popular Front government’s first acts was to relocate potentially belligerent generals to less dangerous posts.
Franco was transferred to the Canary Islands, and General Emilio Mola was sent to Navarre. Franco sent a cryptic letter on June 23, 1936, warning the prime minister that an anti-government conspiracy was growing in North Africa and that he could help stamp it out if given command, but the warnings were virtually ignored. The shooting of anti-fascist militiaman José Castillo by leftist forces on July 12, followed by the execution of prominent right-wing parliamentarian José Calvo Sotelo, marked the beginning of the civil war. Franco, who had until then tried to stay out of the conspiracy, hastily dispatched a message to General Mola guaranteeing his support.
The Popular Front government elected in January 1936 lasted just four months before the country was engulfed in all-out civil war. Spanish Morocco hummed with movement in the early hours of July 17. The uprising was set to begin on July 18, but the discovery of the plot meant it was to start immediately. The garrisons on the mainland were expected to rise a day later.
Upon hearing the news, the CNT and the UGT called a general strike, effectively initiating Republican mobilization. With the critical exception of Seville, which became a landing point for troops arriving from Africa, all of Spain’s major cities remained in Republican hands. Soon the formidable Army of Africa crossed into Spain with the help of transport planes provided by Nazi Germany. Franco eventually gained supremacy in the Nationalist campaign.
His main rivals, José Sanjurjo and Emilio Mola, died in airplane crashes on July 20, 1936, and June 3, 1937, respectively. Over the next three years, the Spanish Civil War killed an estimated 500,000 people, including 200,000 soldiers. On April 1, 1939, Franco’s forces marched into Madrid and declared victory. Immediately after the official Nationalist victory, initial plans for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen were set in motion.
While the valley was imbued with overt references to the former Spanish Empire, the site’s design and enormity were more directly influenced by the architecture of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In fact, a committee of Nazi commanders traveled to oversee the valley’s construction in May 1942. Built just 10 kilometers northeast of El Escorial, where the remains of Spain’s former monarchs had been interred for centuries, the valley was meant to represent an eternal resting place for Spain’s new imperial dynasty, one based not on blood but on ideology. Although Spain never signed a formal alliance with the Axis powers during World War II, its non-belligerent status and its supply of 18,000 Spanish troops to fight alongside Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union severely isolated the country in the post-war climate.
Despite Britain, France, and the United States issuing a joint public statement condemning the Franco regime in 1946, and Spain’s initial exclusion from the United Nations, the country soon became a valuable partner amid American efforts to fortify an anti-communist Western Europe against the backdrop of the Cold War. Tension between the Western world and Spain began to thaw, and Franco’s regime was soon normalized in Western eyes. The Valley of the Fallen was built over a 20-year period using the forced labor of thousands of imprisoned Republican soldiers, many of whom were killed or seriously injured during construction. By 1958, as the international context surrounding Spain and Francoism had dramatically transformed, the monument was reimagined as a site of reconciliation rather than Nationalist victory.
Thousands of Republican remains were exhumed from mass graves across the country and deposited at the monument. The reburial of nearly 8,000 Republican corpses enabled both the destruction of sites of mass atrocity and a way to erase political dissent in body and in memory. Altogether, approximately 33,000 people who died during the Spanish Civil War were buried in the Valley of the Fallen. Falange leader Primo de Rivera and Franco himself were interred within the monument, completing the Francoist crusade.
In 2019, more than four decades after Franco’s burial there, the dictator’s remains were exhumed and transported to a nearby municipal cemetery, where he was reburied beside his wife, Carmen. The Valley of the Fallen, still marked by architecture reminiscent of Mussolini’s Rome and Hitler’s Germany, remains a functioning religious site for locals and for the thousands of tourists who continue to visit each year.