The Spanish government has made it clear that a community of Benedictine monks is no longer welcome at the “Valley of the Fallen,” a Spanish Civil War memorial site not far from Madrid. The government is pressing both to remove the monks and to end their prayers and celebrations at the Basilica of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen.
Spain’s minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Victor Torres, described the executive branch’s intentions during an interview in May with the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “We want them to go,” he said, referring to the Benedictines. The monument “must be a secular center that serves to explain the war and what came next. They cannot stay.”
The government has been redirecting funding from the church since 2021, leading to a general state of disrepair, according to Pablo Linares, spokesperson for the Association in Defense of the Valley of the Fallen. In July, it formed an inter-ministerial commission to formulate a plan for the redesignation of the site.
Spanish media reports that the ministry of culture has started drafting a law that will allow for the monks’ expulsion, which it hopes to accomplish by 2025. But that task will not be easy. The 21 monks do not wish to leave their monastery, and the government must overcome significant legal obstacles.
The late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco commissioned the construction of the church at the site in the aftermath of the civil war. Spain had suffered decades of political instability—including anti-clerical attacks on Catholic churches—leading up to the civil war. Outright conflict broke out in 1936 when Nationalist forces sought to overthrow the elected government.
The three years of conflict that followed saw large-scale atrocities committed by both sides. During its initial weeks, an intensification of anti-religious violence in strongly Republican regions of Spain led to the slaying of 6,000 bishops, priests, men and women religious and lay Catholics. More than 2,100 of those victims have been beatified as martyrs, and 11 have been canonized. For their part, Francoist forces summarily executed Loyalists among the clergy, labor leaders, activists and many thousands more.
Franco emerged from the civil war as the leader of a nationalist faction that sought to re-establish Spain’s constitutional monarchy. But instead of restoring the king, Franco installed himself as dictator. He ordered construction on the Valley of the Fallen site almost immediately after the conflict concluded in 1940.
The basilica also serves as the burial site of 34,000 people killed during the civil war, including dozens who have been declared martyrs and soldiers from both sides of the conflict, transferred from mass graves all over Spain. It was opened in 1959 as a memorial of reconciliation.
The Guinness Book of World Records lists the basilica at the site, carved into the side of the mountain, as the longest church in the world, at more than 850 feet. The site’s memorial cross, reaching more than 500 feet, is listed as the tallest free-standing cross in the world, visible for miles around.
According to Stanley Payne, a historian who has focused on Spanish facism and the civil war, the Valley of the Fallen is the only memorial site in Spain dedicated to reconciliation, a difficult proposition from the outset simply because its construction was the work of the winning side. The monument has always been strongly linked to Franco’s legacy. That link was confirmed in 1975 when the former dictator was buried behind the basilica’s main altar, an honor he had never explicitly requested, according to Mr. Payne.
Despite the controversial interment of Franco, Mr. Payne argues that the art and architecture of the basilica itself carefully avoids military symbolism and images of “conqueror and conquered.” For those willing to look beyond political optics, Mr. Payne says, the church can indeed be a place of peace and reconciliation.
The Benedictine community in the Valley of the Fallen was established as part of an agreement between the Holy See and the Spanish government in 1958. Under the terms of the agreement, the monks have the right to remain on the grounds as long as they fulfill their designated mission—to pray for those who had died in the civil war and for Spain’s peace and prosperity. The agreement cannot be broken unilaterally despite the current government’s desire to convert the church and memorial site at the Valley of the Fallen into a secular center of study and remembrance.
Many in Spain see the government’s move against the Benedictines and the basilica as politically motivated and an affront to religious freedom.
“The monks have done nothing to deserve being removed,” said Mr. Linares. “They have fulfilled their obligations with a lot of self-sacrifice since 1958.”
Mr. Linares’s group is composed of 212 families with a strong connection to the Valley of the Fallen. Many have family members buried in the basilica’s crypt or, like Mr. Linares, a relative who worked on the construction of the monument and church.
Mr. Linares defends the site in the name of his grandfather, who supported the Republican side during the war but afterward worked as a laborer building the church. His grandfather loved the monument and understood it as a memorial of reconciliation, he says.
According to Mr. Payne and Mr. Linares, a spirit of reconciliation prevailed in Spanish society from the end of the civil war through the country’s transition to democracy following Mr. Franco’s death in 1975. Like Mr. Linares’ grandfather, Spaniards of all political persuasions wanted to live in peace and put the horrors of the civil war behind them. An informal agreement among Spain’s political parties, the so-called Pact of Forgetting, discouraged directly confronting the sorrowful history of the past.
But Emilio Silva argues that the civil war and how it is remembered remains a fraught subject. Mr. Silva, a sociologist and journalist, is president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, founded in 2000 principally to locate mass graves and identify the dead from the civil war.
The group sponsors a forensics lab in northwest Spain. Mr. Silva’s grandfather, a noncombatant, was killed by Nationalist forces during the war. Buried in a mass grave, his remains were uncovered and identified in 2002.
According to Mr. Silva, for his family, the post-war decades—including those after the death of Franco—were not years of reconciliation but of silence, when the suffering of victims such as his grandparents went forgotten, untold and uncompensated. He credits organizations like his with finally opening the discussion on historical memory in Spain, a national dialogue he believes is ongoing.
For him, the site serves primarily as a memorial to Franco and the Fascist-Nationalist victory over the Republican forces. He supports changes that, he argues, add historical balance to the memorial. His association has been asking for years that the government include a display in the foyer of the basilica explaining the memorial’s relation to Franco and the political repression that took place during the Franco dictatorship.
While other former governments since the restoration of democracy in Spain have been largely indifferent to the monument, Mr. Silva argues that the valley should be re-established as a secular site that welcomes people of all beliefs. The current government under Spanish Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez seems ready to take those steps.
“Franco inaugurated the monument on the 1st of April 1959, the 20th anniversary of his victory in the Civil War,” the government said in a statement justifying its plans for the memorial. “Both the date chosen and the content of the inaugural speech consolidated Franco’s power and the national Catholic significance of the monument, also expressed in its architecture, its pictorial collection and the religious and legal structure from 1957 to 2022.”
Mr. Payne counters that the Sánchez government’s intention to change the Valley of the Fallen does not promote historical discussion but suppresses it. The proposed changes to the site are being undertaken through stipulations of the Law of Democratic Memory. First passed in 2007 by the left-leaning government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the law called for the removal of all Francoist symbols in Spain, shining a spotlight on the status of the Valley of the Fallen.
But action under the memory law was slow, however, and ground to a halt in 2011, when conservatives returned to power. By 2018, however, Spain again tilted left with the election of Mr. Sánchez.
His government, now in its second term, intensified efforts related to the Law of Democratic Memory in 2022 and took a step that no government in Spain had dared before—putting into law a specific interpretation of the nation’s civil war history. The law officially “repudiates and condemns both the coup d’etat of July 18, 1936 [that was the spark for the civil conflict] and later Francoist dictatorship.”
The law also calls for designated “places of democratic memory which will have a commemorative and didactic function”—among which it designates the Valley of the Fallen. It also declares the Foundation of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen “extinguished” and calls for the creation of a new administrative structure for the site. That process is still underway and will include the expulsion of the Benedictines.
The Sánchez government removed Franco’s body from the basilica in 2019 and has redirected revenue from entry fees (the site receives 300,000 visits in a typical year) to the conversion of one of the basilica’s chapels into a forensics lab for identifying the bodies of those buried at the site. In 2022, the Valley of the Fallen was renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros—the original name of the site—in accordance with the Democratic Memory law.
Mr. Payne considers the government’s plan to secularize the site as both undemocratic and a violation of religious liberty. Despite its past controversies, “what it is now is a basilica of the Catholic Church and no one has the right to mess with it,” he says.
His criticisms extend to the Law of Democratic Memory. “It is a complete fraud of democracy,” he says. “It’s more of a Soviet-style law that assumes the government has the all-seeing capacity to decide who is good and who is bad. It is not even rewriting history. It’s decreeing history instead of allowing for historical discovery.”
Most Spaniards, Mr. Payne says, hold a balanced view of the civil war and do not want their politicians adjudicating it. Spanish political analysts often refer to the political left’s use of Spain’s contemporary history as the “francomodín,” or the Franco-get-out-of-jail-free-card, pulled out to divert public attention from scandals and unpopular policies.
The Sánchez government indeed has lurched from crisis to crisis, but the Spanish prime minister has proven himself a political survivor, still in charge after two snap elections. “He is an audacious politician,” Mr. Payne admits. He expects that Mr. Sánchez will forge ahead with the plan to expel the monks despite public outcry.
It remains to be seen who will outlast whom—the monks or the politician.
