The Franco family will have to return the sculptures from Santiago Cathedral.

BarcelonaHe Pazo de Meirás, in Galicia, It is a property highly representative of the plundering carried out by the Franco regime, and in particular by Franco himself. The castle, which had been owned by the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, was gifted to Franco during the war after a supposed collection that was actually a widespread extortion in all the local towns. Franco then filled it with works of art and relics obtained illegally. The property was not recovered by the State until 2020., but the dispute over the relics has dragged on for several more years. In the chapel where two of the dictator's cleansed women were married were Abraham and Isaac, two 12th-century sculptures attributed to Master Mateo. Originally, they were part of the sculptural grouping on the exterior portico of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. For years, there had been an ongoing dispute between the council and Franco's heirs, who refused to return them. They will finally have to do so following a Supreme Court ruling that invalidated the previous one, according to which the assets had not been properly identified.

The City Council's lawsuit argued that it had purchased these two sculptures from Count Ximonde in 1948 and that there was a deed to prove it. However, a few years later, they passed into Franco's hands. The dictator's wife had a tendency to become infatuated with beautiful things, and in July 1954, during a visit to Santiago City Hall, she expressed interest in Abraham and Isaac. The then mayor wanted to please her and sent them to the Pazo de Meirás without any negotiation or commercial procedures.

The dictator's heirs claimed that their grandparents had always maintained that they had bought them from an antique dealer. The Provincial Court's previous ruling had sided with the dictator's family, stating that the claimed statues had not been correctly identified. According to the Provincial Court, there was no evidence that the statues purchased by the City Hall in 1948 were the same ones the dictator's heirs owned at the time. The Supreme Court's ruling stated that a "patent and manifest error" was committed in the assessment of the evidence. This error occurred because one of the statues the council had purchased was fractured, while the ones owned by the Franco family were not. However, the photographs show this is not the case: one of them has a fracture in the middle of the leg.