The left of Madrid opens up to protect the Valley of the Fallen after a request from Vox

Valley of the Fallen, now renamed to Valle de Cuelgamuros.Santi Burgos

The PSOE and Más Madrid have opened up this Wednesday to protect the Valley of the Fallen against any change or alteration of the architectural complex, as Vox has been demanding since 2022, although they have insisted on the need to “resignify” or “democratically recycle” the monument which served as a tomb for the dictator Francisco Franco until 2019, and which was raised to the greater glory of the dictatorship by thousands of prisoners who still remain buried in the place without the consent of their families.

However, the extreme right demands that the regional government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso be the one to declare Cuelgamuros as an asset of cultural interest (BIC), while the left considers that it should be the State that acts, since the monument belongs to National Heritage.

This was evident this Wednesday in the culture commission of the Madrid Assembly, held in the heat of the declaration as BIC of the Pyramid of the Italians, a fascist monument in Burgos, by the government of Castilla y León.

More information

Ayuso opens up to shield the Valley of the Fallen against the Democratic Memory Law, as Vox claims

“The Community is not competent, request it in Congress, in non-law proposal format, and you will find our support,” said Alicia Torrija, deputy of Más Madrid, forcefully.

“In 2018, when Podemos organized a meeting called Exhumar el Valle, they called me as a dissident opinion member, because I defended protecting the Valley of the Fallen like BIC,” she began.

“We find ourselves facing an uncomfortable heritage, a heritage in conflict (...) The monument is not aseptic.

We have 30,000 dead, 40,000.

(...)”, she recalled.

“There is only one possible approach, that of human rights.

What needs to be done is democratic recycling, explaining without destroying (...) It makes no sense to declare [BIC] only the cross, what makes sense is the whole,” she continued.

And she has defended: “To remember, it is necessary to preserve those elements that we do not want to forget.”

Mar Espinar, of the PSOE, has followed a similar line of argument, although with less forcefulness.

“What BIC wants to declare still houses many unidentified corpses, there is still painful work to exhume anonymous remains,” he told the Vox representatives.

“That space is certainly not going to stay as it is so that everything remains the same, it will stay as it is if it is declared BIC to turn it into a pedagogical center of democratic memory, because it is a museum of horrors for thousands and thousands of families” , he has argued.

And he stressed: “We are at the opposite end of Vox's strategy, but I, personally, do not see any frontal opposition to being declared a BIC, of ​​course, I believe that if it is, what Cuelgamuros has to do is become “a memory center.”

Díaz Ayuso's commitment to maintaining the complex in its current state is known.

In October 2022, he responded to a letter that a representative of Manos Cleans had addressed to him, assuring that he would “never” give permission to demolish either the cross or any other element of the Cuelgamuros Valley, in case the Government wanted to carry out some kind of demolition. of intervention beyond conservation in the monumental complex, located in the Madrid town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, according to the

El Independiente

website .

In fact, under pressure from Vox last legislature, when her government was in a minority, Díaz Ayuso flirted with promoting the protection of the group herself against the state Democratic Memory Law.

Thus, the Executive leaked in 2023 that it believed it had found a way that could guarantee that not a single stone of the monument was touched: the Cultural Heritage Law of the Community of Madrid, recently approved, and which includes ethnographic heritage assets “religious architecture, including traditional calvaries and crosses, as well as decorative elements and movable property directly related to the heritage asset to be protected.”

However, since then there has been no progress, and Vox, in the doldrums after the absolute majority of the PP in the last elections, has decided to recover one of its star issues and recover it for the current affairs of Parliament.

“It is very worrying that the Community of Madrid is looking for excuses not to protect a monument of the category of the Valley of the Fallen,” said Ana María Velasco, from Vox.

“They hide behind the fact that they cannot do it because they have no competition,” she continued.

“But if you have the political will, you can.

And while it does not assume responsibility, knowing what the Government of Spain intends, the monument deteriorates little by little.”

As she is the first to intervene, the Vox representative cannot react to the left's positioning.

The one who does show his surprise at what he heard is Pedro del Corral, PP deputy and scholar of the civil war.

“I congratulate, without serving as a precedent, Mrs. Torrija, for her presentation, a good basis for debate to bring us closer to a future of détente in relation to the Valley of the Fallen,” he congratulates himself.

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