SPAIN: Empty Tomb

Within hours of the end of Spain’s Civil War in 1939, Francisco Franco ordered the construction of a monument to the Nationalists who died fighting for him. With labor recruited from political prisoners anxious to reduce their sentences, work began in 1940 and continued for the next 18 years.

This summer the $40 million Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) was thrown open to the public. It is built on a scale to rival the pyramids. On the rocky crest of one of the foothills of the snow-capped Guadarrama Range sits a sparkling, 5OO-ft., white granite cross, visible on a clear day from Madrid, 28 miles away. Beneath the cross, chipped out of the mountain’s solid rock interior, is a huge crypt, 780 ft. long and richly inlaid with marble. The crypt leads to a basilica 130 ft. high, whose dome is adorned with a mosaic depicting God, the angels and the Nationalists.

Over the years. Franco had changed his original concept of the Valley of the Fallen as a final resting place for himself and other Nationalists. Why not open the crypt to the dead of both sides? Last year he issued a proclamation: “The long period of peace which has followed the victory has seen the development of a policy guided by the highest sense of unity and brotherhood among Spaniards. This must be, therefore, the monument to all the fallen.”

But Spain’s fratricide was too bloody and too recent. Loyalists refused to have their dead entombed with their enemies; Franco’s own Nationalists objected to burial beside Loyalists. “Absolutely not,” snapped Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of Falangist Founder Jose Antonio, when she heard that Franco planned to move her brother’s body from El Escorial (where Spain’s kings are entombed).

In the face of such opposition, Franco hesitated unhappily. Last week the Valle de los Caidos was still undedicated, its burial vaults empty.