Franco symbols mark Spanish roads 50 years after the dictator's death

Fifty years after the death of General Francisco Franco, thousands of monuments, plaques and street names that honor the dictator all over Spain remain on the spot – a legacy that is believed that it has stayed too long.

From the imposing neoclassical arches to Quiet Plazas, which are named after regime loyalists, remains of the almost four decades are still engraved into the public landscape.

Even some bars and restaurants are still showing his image and celebrating the man, whose regime during the civil war from 1936 to 1939 from 1936 to 1939 and the dictatorship, which followed until his death in 1975, made the Disss sayings, arrested and silenced.

“There are still more than 6,000 of these symbols,” said Eduardo Espana, co -founder of the Deberia Desaparecer website (“It should disappear”), which was created in 2022 to pursue what he calls illegal traces of the dictatorship.

“It is incomprehensible that a democratic country would preserve such monuments,” he added and called the figure “breathtaking”.

Near Madrids 50 meters (164 feet) large Siegbogen, which was built in the 1950s to celebrate the victory of Franco's fascist nationalists in the civil war, Espana shows what he sees as unresolved trauma.

“This is not just a piece of architecture. It is a monument to repression,” said the 34-year-old.

The arch, which is located in a busy roundabout, is one of the most famous symbols of the Franco Regime, which is still standing, together with the grandiose valley of the fallen, a huge underground basilica and a mass burial complex for franos that were killed in combat.

– Franco's remains resettled –

After Franco's death, Spain undertook a transition to democracy.

A comprehensive amnesty law that was adopted by Parliament in 1977 protected both former regimeers and anti-Franco activists to the public prosecutor.

Many symbols of the dictatorship remained unaffected.

The efforts to expect the past have gained traction in recent decades.

In 2007, the then soocialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero introduced the “Historical Memorial Act”, whereby public institutions remove French iconography from public spaces.

This dynamic gathered in 2018 when Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, also a socialist, took office.

The following year, his government exhumed Franco's remains from the valley of the fallen and moved them to a discredited family vault to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine for right -wing extremists.

In 2022, a new “democratic memory law” was introduced to honor the victims of the dictatorship and put the local governments under pressure, to eliminate regime symbols.

The change began to take over all over Spain.

In the northwestern region of Galicia and the Canary Islands, crosses were removed in honor of Francoist soldiers.

Under pressure from the prosecutors in the northern city of Santander, renamed 18 streets that were bound to the regime.

And in the southern city of Malaga there is an inventory of French symbols.

– “Think for yourself” – –

Not all votes in this distance campaign.

One of the best-known dissidents is Xianwei, a Chinese immigrant who runs a bar in the central Madrid called “Una, Grande Y Libre” or “One, Great and Free” Franco's motto for Spain.

“Governments shouldn't tell people what to think,” said Chen, who moved to Spain in 1999.

His establishment, filled with busts, flags and posters that glorify the dictator, is a controversial homage to the past.

The law is “manipulated history,” said Chen. “People can think for themselves.”

Some historians are also restless with the advance of extinguishing symbols. They argue for a more differentiated, pedagogical approach.

“The remains of a painful past are not the best way to process or understand it,” said Daniel Rico, professor of art history at the autonomous university of Barcelona and author of “Who is afraid of Francisco Franco?”

“To remove monuments as if we were children who fear of a coat of arms, appears authoritarian,” he said.

Rico supports the contextualization of the deletion – installation of plaques that explain the story instead of scrubbing it from a public perspective, for example.

Espana disagrees and argues that these symbols cause persistent damage.

“History should be taught in schools” and not in public spaces, he said.

“When we stop teaching, the memory of these events disappears.”

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