The Benedictines will remain in the Valley of the Fallen

BarcelonaA year ago, the Spanish government was very clear that Benedictine monks could not remain in the Valley of the Fallen. In May 2024, the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, was very forceful in his statement. an interview in The Country"We want them to leave. We're talking with them and with the church authorities. It has to be a secular center, one that serves to explain the war and what came after. They can't stay. They don't want to leave; there's some resistance, but there was also a push to exhume Franco's remains, and, in the end, justice." But in this tug-of-war with the Catholic Church, the government has had to give in. Finally, as it progresses, Eldiario.es And the Spanish Ministry of the Presidency has confirmed that the Benedictines will not be forced to leave Cuelgamuros. However, former prior Santiago Cantera Montenegro and two other religious will have to leave in the coming weeks, as the Spanish government has explicitly requested in meetings held with representatives of the Vatican.

It was made quite clear in the meeting held by the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, with the Vatican Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, on February 25th that the Catholic Church will not be excluded from the "resignification" of Cuelgamuros. At this meeting, it was agreed that the basilica will not be deconsecrated and that worship will continue to be held, and that no intervention or re-signification of this space will be permitted. Furthermore, it will have a separate entrance. Interventions will be permitted in the vestibule, the atrium, one of the naves, and the dome of the temple. Furthermore, an international competition will be held to decide the type of interventions to be carried out. The Vatican's condition is that a representative of the Church be among the jury members. Obviously, the enormous Catholic cross, which can be seen from miles away, will not be blown up.

The project will be chosen in the next six months—the competition will have two rounds, with ten finalists in the second—and eight more months will be allowed for the drafting of the execution project so that the works can be bid on before the end of 2026. Regarding the budget, prizes of 60,000 euros will be awarded. Once the winner is chosen, the drafting of the project will have a budget of approximately four million euros, and the rehabilitation and construction of the monumental complex will amount to 26 million euros. The Spanish government is considering international landmarks such as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin; the Monument for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama; the Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation in Bogotá; the memorial to the victims of violence in Chapultepec in Mexico City; and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile.

An option that can be turned against the PSOE

The archaeologist Alfredo González-Ruibal, National Essay Award 2024, who led the excavation at Cuelgamuros to document the daily lives of the men, women, and children who lived there and worked for two decades to make Franco's megalomaniacal dream a reality, believes that the approach to the problem of Spanish government "is erroneous." Dictatorial logic, especially if the transformation is reversible. The expulsion of a couple of religious extremists, for example, is useless. "At least they should have moved the Benedictines and desecrated the abbey. We'll have to wait and see what the competition for ideas says, but the emphasis on harmonization, compatibility, and conciliation doesn't bode well. The Valley is not a place where half measures are useful, but this one."

At the moment, it has not been said or has not transpired whether this meeting also discussed how the 33,833 people, of whom 12,410 are unidentified, buried in the crypts will receive, or how it will be explained how it was built. The work lasted more than twenty years and, during the first ten, the labor of political prisoners was used. The conditions in which these prisoners lived and worked were quite terrible: there was a lot of disease, cold and hunger, aggravated by the corruption of the Francoist authorities who resold the prisoners' food.

On the other hand, the exhumations in the Valley of the Fallen will continue. In the very long struggle of more than twenty years of the relatives, yesterday achieved another small victory: the High Court of Justice of Madrid ruled against the Francisco Franco Foundation and far-right organizations trying to stop the work of forensic scientists and archaeologists.