Ex-Spanish dictator’s remains removed from civil war tomb
Franco ruled for decades after civil war
Republican flag-waver near tomb
THE remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco have been moved from a mausoleum to a family grave, 44 years after his state funeral.
Spain’s socialist government said the country should not continue to glorify the fascist, who ruled for nearly four decades until his death aged 82 in 1975.
His family challenged the reburial in the courts but failed.
After Franco’s remains were exhumed, relatives carried his coffin from the basilica at the vast Valley of the Fallen, a controversial civil war monument, on a mountain 30 miles from Madrid.
It was then flown to a family vault in a Madrid cemetery, to be re-buried next to his wife, Maria.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it was “a great victory for dignity, memory, justice and Spanish democracy”.
A handful of people, including the justice minister, a priest and MOURNER Granddaughter Carmen Martinez-Bordiu 22 of the dictator’s descendants, were allowed to attend yesterday’s ceremony. A crane was needed to lift the oneand-a-half ton concrete slab which lay on top of Franco’s tomb.
The family were not allowed to drape the Spanish flag on his coffin so covered it in the flag used at his funeral.
The Valley of the Fallen is a mass grave for more than 30,000 dead from both sides of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, in which Franco’s Nationalist forces defeated the Republican government. Partly built by political prisoners forced into labour by Franco, it has become a shrine for the far right. Thousands killed by his forces were interred there without their families’ consent. Silvia Navarro, whose great uncle died in 1936, welcomed the exhumation saying: “That people killed by Franco’s troops are buried with Franco, it’s absurd.”