Cathedral of the Fallen

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Giles Tremlett takes us into the fierce battles being fought over The Valle de los Caidos, an enormous memorial to Spain’s civil war dead constructed by the dictator Francisco Franco. For some a great monument, for others a war crime. Today, the battle over how Franco and the Civil War should be remembered is one of the most significant religious and political conflicts in Spain.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This monument has been there for a long time. There's something very awe-inspiring about it and it's a magnificent monument if you strip it of its
0:17.0	meaning. I'm Giles Tremlett. I'm a journalist and historian and I'm here in Madrid the capital of Spain for the BBC World Service, to discover why a civil war that
0:36.7	ended almost 80 years ago is still not truly over.
0:42.1	And to find out, I've travelled to the monument at the heart of it,
0:46.7	built by the dictator Francisco Franco that looms over Madrid today, the valley of the fallen.
0:55.0	It's the tomb of 33,000 people
0:58.1	killed as a result of Spain's bitter civil war
1:01.4	and of one man who died in 1975, Franco himself. Today it's the subject of an
1:09.1	intense and mounting political battle.
1:12.4	The Bay of the Los Caidos, the valley of the fallen.
1:16.0	This story I'm telling you is totally unknown to the people who come here.
1:20.0	There are those on the political left who want to radically transform the monument.
1:24.6	This is a very complex monument.
1:26.2	It is an extremely sinister place.
1:28.8	I feel fear.
1:30.4	Or simply blow it to smithereens, dynamited,
1:35.0	and others for whom it's a place of sober, somber remembrance.
1:39.0	I've been coming here for over 35 years,
1:42.0	and the valley of the Poland still affects me.
1:43.7	Even of reconciliation and the daily life of a working church.
1:48.9	You feel like you are in a normal Basilica, a completely normal Basilica. But in a rising tide of anger and recrimination over the legacy of a civil war and an often brutal dictatorship,
2:00.0	it's become one of Spain's most controversial symbols.
	...

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