At the Pazo de Meirás, before it became public property, there were many paintings of Franco in uniform and in a pose of launching himself into conquest; of his wife, Carmen Polo, all bejeweled and serious, as if she were about to scold someone, and colorful still lifes of flowers painted by the dictator. The images of the dictator with his unleashed ego – there were portraits of him in practically every room – coexisted with the gazes of dead animals he had hunted that hung on the walls.

"Ruins tell what people keep silent about," affirms archaeologist Alfredo González Ruibal (Madrid, 1976), who has spent two decades excavating the remnants of the Civil War and Francoism. He has explored mass graves, trenches, concentration camps, and shacks, and has eaten a pizza in the kitchen of the Pazo de Meirás, the summer residence of the Franco family until very recently. Pazo de Meirás, the summer residence of the Franco family until very recently. He has followed the trails of hunger and abundance. In País en ruinas (Crítica), he demonstrates that Spain is a great archaeological site of the repression of the war and the dictatorship, and that, indeed, many "treasures" that rebel against silence are hidden there.

He 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.