El Valle de Los Caidos

While Nazi Germany plotted the Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, Stalin thought that competition meant eliminating everybody.  Europe and the U.S. pretended that if we just looked the other way, they would go away.  They didn't.

Instead, the world wide disaster brought on by the Roaring Twenties and the Allies having trashed WWI's losers, led to the mushrooming of dictators, every country seeing enemies among themselves.  Up sprang opportunists promising instant relief.  Translation: “I'll rescue you from these enemies within.  And I'll beat up on your neighbors.”  They all called themselves Socialists.  It was the first time I'd heard of right wing, conservative socialism; but then Stalin's Communism looked remarkably like Ivan's Czarism.

Francisco Franco was “protector of the Crown,” building his Fascist army in Africa and bent on turning Spain into his own Falange.  Hitler, wanting to try out new weaponry, gave to Franco guns, specialists, and military vehicles. Stalin promptly matched the Nazi contributions with his own. Spain's modest, internal tussle stopped being modest.

England only really cared about Gibraltar and remained technically neutral. Which, de facto, meant Spain was flooded with enough spies to form an unofficial United Nations.  Spain became the safest place to be during WWII.

That, in turn, meant Franco had to keep his people relatively calm. Unlike every other dictatorship, he treated loyalists and populists alike with careful respect. 

Toledo

His political masterpiece was creating El Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen), memorializing combatants of BOTH sides equally. Placed in La Mancha, not far from Toledo, the site is deliberately isolated.  Even the countryside is quiet, almost barren.  Rising from the cone of an ancient caldera, Franco built a magnificent basilica replete with massive, action murals.  One could be standing before Diego Rivera exhibitions.

Driving toward the site, one begins to feel a grayness settling in. The memorial spire appears gradually, peering above cone center.  Finally, coming around a curve to the parking area, the great building emerges suddenly, like a curtain drawn. 

A wide promenade surrounds the basilica guarded by several bronze lions, larger than elephants.

Inside, the dome is dominated by massed action murals, massed violence.  Bloody courage is everywhere...above, to the sides, in every direction, even in side rooms.  Inscriptions detail the history minutely. 

              

A guard helped me photograph one of the side room ceiling murals.  I asked him how Spaniards, some three decades since the war, now feel about Franco.  He shrugged slightly.  He responded in Spanish, “That was then. El Generalissimo has mellowed, as have we  –  my parents. We Spanish are, as you say, open of the heart.”

He was so right!  I loved Spain.  Probably because they were so wonderful to me, everywhere.  The longer I was in Spain, the more I've puzzled that these people could have waged the most savage violence on each other.