General Franco’s body will be exhumed says Spanish Supreme Court

Spain will move the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from a giant mausoleum to a municipal cemetery, after the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected his family’s appeal against the plan. 

The Socialist government argues the Valley of the Fallen, a 3,000 acre site laid out underneath an enormous cross, glorifies Franco’s regime and should be turned into a memorial to victims of the 1936-39 civil war. 

In a unanimous ruling on Tuesday, six judges said there was no reason to prevent the symbolic exhumation, which parliament authorised last year despite strong objections from Franco supporters. 

The judges also agreed with the plan drawn up by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s administration to re-inter the dictator’s body along with his wife, Carmen Polo, in a family tomb just outside the capital in the El Pardo park.    

The ruling, which ends a decades-long saga, is set to mark the campaign for a snap election due on November 10. 

“We will do it very quickly, better sooner than later because that is what the ruling asks of us,” said Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo.

Franco ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975 and his legacy looms over the country’s politics.

Left-wing parties celebrated the verdict but the main conservative opposition Popular Party has refused to confirm it would obey the law in power. 

Representing the dictator’s grandchildren, the lawyer Luis Felipe Utrera said he would appeal to the Constitutional Court because the family was being “denied the fundamental right to decide where to bury their dead”.

Franco’s heirs say that if the dictator must be moved it should only be to a vault in Madrid’s cathedral, La Almudena.

Campaigners for Franco’s victims gathered outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with many pointing out that the dictator’s family is lucky to know where their dead lie.

“I could not care less what they do with Franco,” 87-year-old Benito Bellido told the online newspaper Público. “I was seven when they took away my father, a poor leftist farmworker, and I never heard from him again.”

Emilio Silva, leader of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, said the Socialist government should have moved faster and had used the exhumation process for electoral purposes.

“It’s an important ruling and cause for satisfaction that a democratic government be allowed to put some order in this country’s past, but it has been sad to see that the family of a dictator was able to defy democracy for 15 months,” Mr Silva told The Telegraph.

Despite the court ruling, which will also cover further appeals yet to be heard, the president of the Francisco Franco Foundation, Juan Chicharro Ortega told Spain’s TVE state television that the decision meant nothing as long as the Benedictine prior of the Valley of the Fallen opposed the removal of the dictator.

“Without the permission of the Church, Franco cannot be exhumed, whatever the Supreme Court and the government say,” the retired Gen. Chicharro said.

Prior Santiago Cantera, who stood as a candidate for the fascist Falange party in two elections in the 1990s, said in media interviews earlier this year that he would not allow the exhumation to take place, describing the basilica as an “inviolable space”.

The Valley of the Fallen was built in part by prisoners and is also home to 34,000 of Spain’s war dead.