Historical Memory in Post-Franco Spain: Remembering a Purposely Forgotten Past through Memorialization at the Valle de los Caídos in Cuelgamuros

Abstract

The Valley of the Fallen, built within the mountains of the valley of Cuelgamuros, in Madrid, Spain, represents both the monumentality and decadence of dictator Francisco Franco’s thirty-six-year regime in Spain. Newly renamed to Valle de Cuelgamuros, the Valley of the Fallen parallels Spain’s politicized collective historical memory through an exhibition of highly curated sculptures and statues throughout the complex, including the world’s largest cross. Following Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, newly democratic Spain initiated the Pacto de Olvido (Pact of Forgetting), an informal agreement between both political sides to “forget” Franco’s legacy of repression and the acts of atrocity committed under the regime. As a result, Spain’s political parties enacted the 1977 Amnesty Law that exonerated those who committed political crimes or violence during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. The Amnesty Law was envisioned as a way to overcome divisions of the past, but the historical amnesia caused problems of its own for Spain. The Valley of the Fallen is still a reminder of Francisco Franco’s forced historical narrative. There he was entombed for forty-four years (until his exhumation in 2019), and over thirty thousand Republicans and Nationals remain buried there. In the year 2000, the “grandchildren” of Francoism began to seek answers and search for the bodies of their loved ones killed and buried throughout Spain in unmarked mass graves. Spain’s response was a series of memory laws to reconcile its forgotten past. While the Historical Memory Law (2007) and the Democratic Memory Law (2022) officially condemned and delegitimized Franco’s regime, these laws came with flaws and did little for transitional justice. Condemnation of Franco’s regime resulted in additional erasure of the past with the removal of any symbol or statue in exaltation of Franco. This thesis examines the physical space of the Valley of the Fallen, studies the controversy over political amnesia and reconciliation of Spain’s past, considers the strengths and weaknesses of the Law of Historical Memory (2007) and the Law of Democratic Memory (2022), and interrogates the current removal of Francoist symbols in order to demonstrate the problems of Spain’s desire to reconcile a past of collective amnesia, as a result of culturally embedded silencing, with a current erasure of a past without any pedagogical element.