The national monument to those fallen for Spain

The Valley of the Fallen (El Valle de los Caídos) represents the most intimate and public history of Francoism. The monument is an imitable piece of historical evidence, in the sense that it oozes the spirit which gave birth to it, as well as the intentions and desires of the dictator himself, who played a principal role in its design and construction. Meanwhile, the monument offers a public history of the regime, because it mirrors what the regime wished itself to be and reflects the regime’s politics of memory relating to the Spanish Civil War. No study of Francoist monuments would be complete without close scrutiny of El Valle de los Caídos. As one official guide published in 1960 put it, the site was ‘the Monument to those Fallen for Spain’. ¹ It is simultaneously an exceptional monument and a monument like any other. In one sense, El Valle de los Caídos is genuinely exceptional in Europe. No twentieth-century dictatorship boasted a monument of this type, and no dictator was remembered and eulogised in a tomb for so long and across so many different generations. Meanwhile, El Valle de los Caídos is a metaphor for the existence of the past in the present. ²