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99% Invisible

408- Valley of the Fallen

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.827.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A monument built by a fascist that was meant to honor people who died in the Spanish Civil War, but is also a mass grave of the people he murdered

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is 99% invisible.

0:02.6

I'm Roman Mars.

0:06.5

About an hour northwest of Madrid and enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky

0:12.4

mountaintop, it's so big you can see it from miles away.

0:17.0

Beneath the cross, there's a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved out of the

0:21.9

mountain.

0:22.9

This place is called the Valley of the Fallen, and it's likely the most controversial

0:28.4

monument in Spain.

0:30.3

The Valley is synonymous with Francisco Franco, the general who ruled Spain from the end

0:35.0

of its bloody civil war in 1939 until his death in 1975.

0:40.6

That's reporter Jennifer Omani.

0:42.6

When Franco died, he became the valley's most notorious inhabitant.

0:47.1

His body was buried under a huge stone slab.

0:50.6

But as the decades passed after his death, anger about the monument grew.

0:54.8

People began to push for the removal of Franco's body.

0:58.3

They argued there was no place in a democracy for a monument exulting a man who had tortured

1:03.8

and killed thousands of Spaniards in the name of fascism.

1:07.8

And then in October of 2019.

1:10.7

Now the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 44 years ago.

1:15.5

Today his remains were moved from the Valley of the Fallen.

1:18.8

Franco's body was disinterred.

1:20.9

His coffin packed into a helicopter and then flown to a graveyard on the outskirts of

...

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