The impressive mausoleum in the “Valle de los Caídos”, a symbolic site of Francoism that housed the dictator’s grave until 2019, will soon be renovated, said the Ministry of Housing, which on Tuesday revealed the project selected after an international competition.
“ Base and crosswinning project of the International Ideas Competition for resignation The Cuelgamuros Valley (…) offers a new vision of a monumental ensemble” that combines “wisdom in the landscape, while assuming a clear environmental transformation”, pointed out the ministry
📍’The base and the cruz’, the project won by the International Competition of Ideas for the withdrawal of the Cuelgamuros Valley
El SG @inaquicarnicero and British architect and Pritzker prize winner David Chipperfield was able to envision this future property. pic.twitter.com/c9pDucyI5u
— Ministerio de Vivienda y Agenda Urbana (@viviendagob) November 11, 2025
The “Valle de los Caídos” (“Valle of the Fallen”), renamed “Valle de Cuelgamuros” by the leftist government, remains a place of pilgrimage for those who miss Francoism.
Rehabilitating the memory of the victims of the Civil War
To prevent this place from remaining a place of contemplation, Pedro Sánchez’s government launched this anonymous architectural competition “to conceptually change the emotional dimension” of the place.
The socialist prime minister has attempted since taking office as chief executive (2018) to rehabilitate the memory of the victims of the Civil War and Francoism.
To this end, he passed a so-called “democratic memory” law in 2022, which honors the victims of the dictatorship and encourages regional governments to remove symbols of the Franco regime.
The site of the former Valle de los Caídos houses a basilica erected on Franco’s orders, 50 km from Madrid. This is where his body lay until its exhumation in 2019.
In the basilica, which is crowned with a 150 m high cross visible from several kilometers, there were about 33,000 fighters belonging to both sides of the Civil War: the Francoists and the Republicans. Among the latter, many had their bodies taken there without their families’ knowledge.
Franco’s body sat proudly on the altar of his death basilica until October 2019, when Pedro Sánchez’s government moved it to a cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid.
In April 2023, the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, a fascist party that was one of the pillars of the Franco regime, was also exhumed and moved to a civilian cemetery.
