Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, Where Human Remains Disappear: A Funerary Monument for a Dictator

This paper reflects on the Franco dictatorship’s ideological use of the bodies of Spanish Civil War dead at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) monument near Madrid. It examines how from 1958 onwards human remains were exhumed from cemeteries and mass graves across Spain and reinterred at the site, and it argues that, much like the setting and architecture of the memorial complex itself, they were used politically to make a distinction in Spain’s national memory between the war’s winners and losers. This served as the foundation for the necropolitical legitimacy of the Franco regime.