"From Francoist to independent"

The visit of the Spanish monarchs to Montserrat to commemorate the abbey's millennium has attracted the attention of the Spanish media, especially due to the tension with the pro-independence protesters. Public mirror They reveled in the images of the confrontation with the Mossos d'Esquadra and Puigdemont's tweet criticizing the event. The Griso commentators compared it to the people who demonstrated at the Valley of the Fallen and lamented its supposed ultra-orthodoxy. A testament to the collaborators' knowledge. On Telecinco, Ana Rosa Quintana looked disgusted when she saw the images of the protesters: "What were the King and Queen doing there?" she asked indignantly. "The issue is increasingly tense," the presenter concluded, appealing to a catastrophic drift. Cristina Cifuentes replied: "It's the last straw that the King and Queen of Spain can't visit a part of Spain."

The news programs didn't give much importance to the monarchs' visit. Antena3 News It was a brief episode on the same level as Emiliano García-Page's slip while taking a penalty at an inauguration. On Telecinco and Cuatro, it was nothing more than a few boos without any major significance, and they highlighted the limited presence of pro-independence protesters, which served to demonstrate the decline of the independence process.

The Sixth News It was the network that most focused on the millennium of Montserrat. They reported on the hundreds of protesters, the shouts and whistles directed at the monarchs, and featured a fragment of Felipe VI's speech in which he lamented extremism. They then emphasized the history of Montserrat with a video of archive footage, mostly from the No-Do. They displayed a banner on screen summarizing the abbey's historical role: "From Francoist to Independent," they summarized. They included images of Franco kissing the Moreneta (Blessed Virgin Mary) and "entering the basilica under a canopy." They defined Montserrat as a favorite spot for the dictator, "one of his points of special interest." They also mentioned that Montserrat had served as a source of inspiration for the dictator when designing his Valley of the Fallen. They praised the figure of Abbot Escarré as an abbot grateful to Franco's regime: "He even installed vestiges and carried out Francoist acts," they said of him, although they later added that, in the 1950s, he distanced himself, criticized the regime, and was forced into exile. Entering the story of the 1970s, they already explained how the abbey had served as a refuge for dissidents and had become a space for the protection of Catalan culture or the foundation of Jordi Pujol's Convergència.

This perception of the dictatorship, where everything seems to be done voluntarily, out of sympathy and affinity with the regime and not out of fear or lack of alternatives, is symptomatic. But it is not the first time that, in their portrait of Catalonia, Catalanism is a recent phenomenon that appears after a Francoist past.