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El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen) is a Catholic basilica (the Holy Cross basilica in the Valley of the Fallen), an abbey (the Holy Cross abbey in the Valley of the Fallen) and a monumental complex. It is located in the Cuelgamuros valley of the Guadarrama mountain range, in the municipality of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Community of Madrid, Spain, 9.5 kilometres north of the monastery of El Escorial. It was built mainly with the labour of Republican political prisoners, and also some workers hired between 1940 and 1958
The architects Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez participated in its design; the sculptures are by Juan de Ávalos and Taborda, among others. The cross is 150 metres high and has arms of 24 metres each.
The complex has belonged to the National Heritage since it was opened to the public on April 1st, 1959. Since 1990 the number of visitors varies between 150,000 and 500,000 per year.
The national-catholic dictator Francisco Franco, ordered its construction and that José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist party Falange Española, and combatants in the Civil War, the republican side and the rebel side, were buried there. There is no separation between the two sides, they are intermingled. With the official remains of 33 847 different people, and described as the "largest common grave in Spain", according to a source in the Valley included in an article published in El País in 2008, the exhumation of corpses would be impossible, given that they would have ended up forming part of the very structure of the building, having been used to fill in internal cavities in the crypts, and that, due to the effect of humidity, they would have ended up forming an "indissoluble collective corpse". CSIC tests in 2018 confirm this.
A partial restoration was completed in 2012. In 2018 visits increased by 103 % and reached more than 4000 per weekend on the occasion of the announcement of the possible (at that time) exhumation of Franco's remains. This exhumation took place on 24 October 2019. The remains of the former dictator were moved to the Mingorrubio cemetery, together with those of his widow Carmen Polo, thus complying with the Law of Historical Memory.
Source: Valle de los Caídos - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre