The Francoist regime constructed the Valley of the Fallen between 1940 and 1959, allegedly as a monument to reconciliation after the civil war (1936–1939). The dictator continued repressing Republicans and portraying them as an alliance of forces to destroy Spain, while simultaneously using the Valley to declare peace and impose a narrative of fraternity. Hence, the Valley became the centralized artifact of the civil war’s commemoration, to which all other memorials around the country would ultimately refer because of its central location and concentration of burials: almost thirty-four thousand bodies of people killed during the civil war were transferred from mass graves all around the country to the Valley’s ossuaries, in most cases without the consent, or even awareness, of their families.

Upon Franco’s death in 1975, the dictator’s tomb was placed in the Valley as well, occupying the most prominent location near the basilica’s main altar, alongside Falange’s founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Despite the pro-Franco demonstrations and the philo-Fascist mass services it has regularly hosted, the Valley has remained under the care of National Patrimony, funded by Spanish taxpayers, and this state of affairs went mostly uncontested until the first few years of the twenty-first century. By the turn of the millennium, the grassroots Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM) had started mapping and exhuming mass graves, as well as raising awareness about the need to intervene in the Valley by identifying the bodies buried there against the victims’ and their families’ will, exhuming the dictator’s body, and resignifying the space.

This work by ARHM triggered in Spain what has been called “the memory boom” of the 2000s, in which collective and individual memory was used as an alternative, even a counter-narrative, for telling the story of the war and the post-war through literature, the visual arts, activism, and academia. Eventually, this new sensibility materialized in legislation. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government (2004–2011) passed the 52/2007 Law, commonly known as the Historical Memory Law, which obliged the removal of Francoist monuments, toponymy, and other symbols that eulogized the dictatorship. This included the Valley of the Fallen, although its physical removal is not possible: the memorial is excavated out of the rock; the basilica and cross is composed of many tons of granite; and it hosts thousands of bodies, mostly of Republicans.