Basílica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos

We left El Escorial and drove about 10km northeast, to the Valley of Cuelgamuros, formerly known as Valley of the Fallen. It is a monument in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains near Madrid. The valley contains a Catholic basilica and a monumental memorial .

Dictator Francisco Franco ordered construction of the site after the civil war. It was built from 1940 to 1958 and opened in 1959. Franco said that the monument was intended as a “national act of atonement” and reconciliation.

The site served as Franco’s burial place from his death in November 1975 (although it was not originally intended that he be buried there) until his exhumation on 24 October 2019 following a long and controversial legal process. This was due to moves to remove all public veneration of his dictatorship.

The monument, considered a landmark of 20th-century Spanish architecture, was designed by Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez on a scale to equal, according to Franco, “the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and memory”.

Together with the Universidad Laboral de Gijón, it is the most prominent example of the original Spanish Neo-Herrerian style, which was intended to form part of a revival of Juan de Herrera’s architecture, exemplified by the nearby royal residence El Escorial.

The monument precinct covers over 13.6 square kilometres of Mediterranean woodlands and granite boulders on the Sierra de Guadarrama hills, more than 900 metres above sea level and includes a basilica, a Benedictine abbey, a guest house, the Valley, and the Juanelos - four cylindrical monoliths dating from the 16th century.

The most prominent feature of the monument is the towering 150 metre-high Christian cross, the tallest such cross in the world, erected over a granite outcrop 150 metres over the Basilica esplanade and visible from 30 kilometres away.

Beneath the Valley floor lie the remains of 40,000 people, whose names are accounted for in the monument’s register. The valley contains remains of both Nationalists an Republicans. Republicans were interred here mostly without the consent or even the knowledge of their families; some estimates claim that there 33,800 victims of Francoism interred - and their families have legal problems in recovering the remains of their family member.

Franco was exhumed and removed from the church in 2019 in an effort to lower the public veneration of the place. He is now buried in the municipal cemetery that serves the Madrid neighbourhoods of Mingorrubio and El Pardo.

We toured the Basilica which is very big and quite austere, but no photos were allowed.Read more