Remaking a monument: The troubled meaning of fascist remains in contemporary Spain

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ABSTRACT The Valley of Cuelgamuros, until recently known as the Valley of the Fallen, lies about 35 miles outside of Madrid. Inaugurated by the dictator Francisco Franco in 1959, this landmark comprises a vast underground basilica and houses the mostly anonymous remains of 34,000 Spaniards who died during the civil war (1936–1939) and its repressive aftermath. Since the early 2000s, the Valley has been a political lightning rod in a country that has long struggled with how to address the legacies of its authoritarian past. Ongoing debates among politicians, scholars, and journalists have revolved around the possibility of the Valley’s ‘resignification’ – a process exemplified in 2019 by the exhumation of Franco’s body from a tomb behind the basilica’s main altar. In this paper, I perform critical discourse analysis on public texts that have emerged in these debates to distil the notion of resignification and to highlight its entanglement with conflicting narratives about Franco’s regime. Recruiting semiotic concepts from linguistic anthropology, I shed light on the complexities of recent efforts to transform the landmark through material and discursive interventions. My analysis reveals how calculated and coincidental changes at a site of contested heritage can serve to unsettle a dominant account about the past, even as proponents of such changes wrestle with the temptation of a totalizing narrative themselves.