The tomb in the mountain

High in the mountains outside Madrid stands the Valley of Cuelgamuros (formerly know as the Valley of the Fallen), a huge memorial site commissioned by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1940, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, where tens of thousands of war dead from both sides still lie buried. At its heart is a large basilica – the second largest Catholic basilica after St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome – carved into a granite mountainside, a huge rock, topped by a 150-metre cross, the tallest in the world. Silvia Navarro’s great-uncle is buried there. He was a businessman, not a soldier, killed by nationalist forces for being a Republican sympathiser. His remains are sealed somewhere inside, behind the walls that carry fascist iconography alongside Christian symbolism. Sylvia, herself a Catholic, wants his remains located and removed from the basilica. She believes the site still glorifies the regime that killed him. William Crawley explores the site and its ongoing controversies.