MADRID: Experts on Monday began inspections of a vast mausoleum where dictator Francisco Franco is buried along with thousands of victims of Spain’s civil war, in preparation for the first exhumations of some of the bodies.

In March 2016, a court authorised the exhumations from the Valley of the Fallen, more than 40 years after Franco’s death.

And technical experts have now arrived at the site to determine whether the exhumations can go ahead, given the state of the monument, as well as of the bones, which have been poorly preserved and not properly separated.

“It’s a historic event. The technicians have entered. It seems that something is going to be done,” said Maria Purificacion Lapena, the granddaughter of a man executed by Franco’s forces. In March 2016, a Spanish court granted Lapena’s request for the exhumation of the body of her grandfather, Manuel Lapena Altabas, and great-uncle Antonio Lapena Altabas so that they could be given a proper funeral.

The two men, both members of an anarchist group, were killed at the outset of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and buried in a mass grave in the northeastern region of Aragon.

In 1959, their remains were transferred without the consent of their family to the Valley of the Fallen, which became Franco’s final resting spot when he died in 1975.

Built by Franco’s regime between 1940 and 1958 in the granite mountains of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the Valley of the Fallen holds the remains of over 30,000 dead from both sides in the civil war.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2018