The Monumento Nacional de Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caidos ("National Monument of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen") is a triumphant memorial site erected at Cuelgamuros in the Guadarrama Valley near Madrid, Spain, to the orders of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, ostensibly to honor the people killed in the Spanish Civil War. A valley 10 km north of El Escorial was rededicated to the purpose, 1940-04-01 , which includes Franco's own tomb, hollowed out of a mountainside. To the memorial site belongs an underground church and the tallest memorial cross in the world, a 152.4 metre high construction of stone.
Those buried in the Valley of the fallen, however, are thousands of Nationalist soldiers; the few former Republicans buried there were added among the collection of unknown soldiers assembled from temporary graves at the end of the war. Franco's timing of his announcement of the decision to create the monument left no doubts: it was the day of the victory parade to celebrate the first anniversary of his triumph over the Republic, Franco announced his personal decision to raise a splendid monument to those who had fallen in his cause [1]. The shrine, designed by Pedro Muguruza, on a scale to equal "the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness" (Franco, 1940-04-01 ), is laid out in the International Fascist classicism exemplified by Albert Speer or Mussolini's bombastic Foro Italico in Rome, a conservative form of Moderne. It consists of a wide plaza with a spectacular view of the valley and the outskirts of Madrid in the distance. A long vaulted tunnelled crypt was cut out of solid granite by twelve thousand political prisoners working without pay. A Roman Catholic monastery on the other side of the mountain houses priests who say the perpetual masses. In 1960, with franco firmly in power, Pope John XXIII declared the underground crypt a Basilica. On the wrought-iron gates, Franco's neo-Habsburg double-headed eagle is prominently displayed.
The Valle de los Caidos remains a popular pilgrimage site. Spain's Socialist Government has been debating plans to redesignate the Valley of the Fallen as a memorial to all Spaniards killed in conflict [2].
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