Franco’s body should be left where it is

Is it really necessary to dig up the remains of General Franco, asks Rubén Amón. As one of his first
acts in office, our new socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, plans to exhume the dictator’s corpse
from its tomb in the Valley of the Fallen, the giant mausoleum in the hills outside Madrid. That
honours the result of a vote by MPs in a motion brought by Sánchez’s party two years ago to turn
it into a “place of reconciliation”. Many Spaniards are cheering. They complain that the monument
glorifies a man responsible for mass murder, while the corpses of his victims rot in unidentified
graves. They have a point: a democracy should not have a shrine to “the memory of a tyrant”. Even
so, Franco would be better left where he is. At no point since his death in 1975 has Spain been in
greater danger of slipping back into its turbulent past; this is hardly the time to revive his “spectre”.
And look at the monument itself – a “ridiculous” edifice of grandiose Catholic “kitsch”. To reach
the tomb, visitors have to pass through a tunnel adorned with “horrible sculptures” like something
out of “a low-budget horror film”. What more fitting memorial could there be to Franco’s “mediocrity and obscenity”? Better to leave him where he is, buried under a 1,500-kilo slab of concrete.