Forgotten people from Spain

On October 24, 2019, Francisco Franco’s coffin left his mausoleum in the Valle de los Caídos – literally the Valley of the Fallen – where he had been buried since 1975. He left behind an architectural work of national Catholic glory and the country’s largest mass grave, containing almost 30,000 corpses, the majority belonging to Franco’s side and the remaining third to the Republican side. This division between the dead of opposing camps was intended to symbolize the great project of national reconciliation designed to extinguish the fire of civil war.

In the country’s current political context, Franco’s exhumation, while a powerful gesture, does not solve all the problems. Those who are asking to recover the bodies of their parents or grandparents, who have been lying in the crypt of the basilica for 70 years, or who are calling for the excavation of the graves that still cover the country, are struggling to be heard.

Spain continues to pay for a cumbersome past that it wanted to exclude. At the risk of hearing the voices of all those forgotten by the democratic transition…