The municipality of Alberche del Caudillo (1,717 inhabitants, Toledo) has paralyzed the process to start the name change and eliminate its Franco toponym since 2023, despite the 2022 Democratic Memory Law calling for its elimination. Alberche, a smaller entity than Calera y Chozas, is one of 14 municipalities on which the National Institute of Colonization, which promoted the repopulation of agricultural areas, imposed references to Franco in its name through a 1958 decree. To this day, six municipalities still retain their Frankish toponyms after the Malaga district of Villafranco del Guadalhorce approved last August to eliminate this reference. Besides Alberche itself, there are still Llanos del Caudillo (Ciudad Real), Villafranco del Guadiana (Badajoz), Alcocero de Mola (Burgos), Quintanilla de Onísimo (Valladolid) and San Leonardo de Yagüe (Soria).
The municipality of Alberche del Caudillo started the procedure in February 2023 with a resolution signed by the city mayor, Ana Isabel Rivelles (PP), but shortly afterwards paralyzed it on the basis of a legal report commissioned by the municipal council of Calera y Chozas which approved the non-compliance since there is still no official catalog of Franco’s vestiges. The mayor of Calera y Chozas, Gregorio López, takes advantage of the absence of this list to justify the interruption of the proceedings. “We are here to respect the law, but if it has not been developed…”, says, in statements to SER Toledo, the popular councilor who, he assures, will resume the process once the list is published. “When the catalog is published and is inside, we will try to comply with the law, like everything else,” he says. “It will be done,” he then states. Pedro Sánchez’s manager wants this catalog to be ready by the end of the year.
The text signed by the mayor of Alberche urges us to “immediately redefine the name” and to adopt “measures to restore legality” after a request sent by Eduardo Ranz, a lawyer expert in democratic memory, who also criticizes Sánchez’s executive for not having respected its own rule and not having sanctioned these violations, the only administration that, remember, can do so after the approval of the Law on Democratic Memory of 2022. “That law states that it can only investigate the files and, therefore, criminally prosecute the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory, but we do not understand why it does not sanction or freeze the subsidies”, as the law allows. The lawyer also asked the Guarantor “to act” after the paralysis of the trial but, today, he underlines, “everything remains the same”. “This non-compliance comes to the Alberche City Council free of charge,” he adds.
The Council of Ministers last week approved the decree for the drafting of the catalog of Francoist symbols and elements in public spaces. Its preparation, explained the Minister of Territorial Policies and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, will correspond to a technical commission and will be updated periodically with the proposals that arrive. It remains to be seen whether the document will include municipalities that still retain allusions to the dictatorship in their names. But this requirement, on which the municipality of Alberche del Caudillo relies, is not necessary, explains Ranz to EL PAÍS, for this municipality to cling to its slogan Francoist and does not act ex officio. «It is a lax interpretation of the law because the law provides for a specific article dedicated to these toponyms and we should only wait for the catalog if the name generates doubts or confusion, but this is not the case», specifies the lawyer.
The consultation of Llanos del Caudillo
In a similar situation to that of Alberche is Llanos del Caudillo (657 inhabitants, Ciudad Real), the other municipality in Castilla-La Mancha that retains its Francoist “surname”. In 2018, a sentence was ruled in favor of the City Council so that it should not change its name by not inserting an express mention of toponyms referring to the Franco regime into the Law on Historical Memory in force at the time. He did so after a request from Ranz after not getting a response to another request. 14 years earlier, in 2004, with the PSOE in municipal government, the Llanos del Caudillo city council held a popular consultation to ask neighbors. Of the 400 votes cast, only 50 asked to change the name. “We have difficulty recovering our forgotten ones, but we also suffer the humiliation of seeing streets, squares and avenues dedicated to those who ordered the murder of our relatives”, complains the lawyer.
