Erected on a mountaintop 8 miles north of the monastery of El Escorial, the massive cement cross soars a
bewildering 5 hundred feet in the air above a barren valley, with a span of 150 feet, where it can be seen from more than 100 miles away.
The rocky gorge beneath the cross-aptly named the Valley of the Fallen-is the final resting place of more than
40 thousand souls, victims of both sides of the bloody Spanish War.
While the location I spectacular, this is one of the most sinister places known. The Valley of the Fallen was begun
in the 1940s in the orders of General Franco, supposedly to commemorate those who died in the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939).
After the war ended, Republican prisoners, many of whom died in the process, were drafted in to dig the site out
of the Rocky mountainside.
Completed nearly 2 decades later in 1958, the basilica contains an enormous crypt that houses the tombs of
General Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the far-right Falangist party.
More than 30,000 soldiers, both Nationalist and Republican, are believed to be buried in the walls of the basilica
and in the hillside around it. Campaigns have been underway for years to move Franco's tomb, exhume victims of
the war and create a museum to offer a more balanced view of the conflict, but these moves have so far been so
far been thwarted by legal obstacles.
