Daily Times

“Since they are going to remove Franco, I wanted to see it. It’s morbid curiosity,” says Antonio Nevado, one of thousands of Spaniards who have rushed to visit the late dictator’s tomb before his remains are moved.

Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the 1936-39 civil war until his death in 1975, is buried in an imposing basilica carved into a mountain-face just outside Madrid with a 150-metre (490-feet) cross towering over it.

Visitor numbers to the site — known as the Valley of the Fallen — have soared since Spain’s new Socialist government announced shortly after it came to power in June that it will remove Franco’s remains from the basilica.

Spain’s national heritage agency that runs the monument said 38,269 people visited in July compared to 23,135 in June and 25,532 in July last year.

Javier Botia, 40, and his partner Angeles Abellan, 42, two agricultural engineers from the southeastern region of Murcia, say they had long planned to visit the monument even though they did not “sympathise” with Franco and felt “now was the time”.

“This is history, it is part of our heritage, it’s very impressive,” says Botia as he stands on the basilica’s vast esplanade and looks up at the giant granite and concrete cross, visible for kilometres (miles) around.

Published in Daily Times, August 20^th 2018.