Spain’s leftist government will publish next month a list of symbols of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to be removed from public spaces, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Wednesday.
The move will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the death of Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist after his side emerged victorious from the country’s 1936-39 civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Sánchez told parliament that before the end of November, his government will publish “a complete list of Francoist symbols and elements, so they can finally be removed from our country and from our streets.”
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From imposing neoclassical arches to quiet plazas named after regime loyalists, remnants of Franco’s nearly four-decade rule are still etched into the public landscape.
Campaign group Debería Desaparecer (“It Should Disappear”), created in 2022 to track what it calls illegal vestiges of the dictatorship, says there are over 6,000 such symbols still standing.
One of the most prominent is Madrid’s 50-metre (164-foot) tall Victory Arch, built in the 1950s on a busy roundabout to celebrate the victory of Franco’s fascist-backed nationalists in the civil war.
After Franco’s death on November 20th 1975, Spain underwent a transition to democracy.
But a sweeping amnesty law passed by parliament in 1977 shielded both former regime officials and anti-Franco activists from prosecution.
Many symbols of the dictatorship remained untouched.
Efforts to reckon with the past have gained traction in recent decades.
In 2007, then-Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero introduced the “Historical Memory Law”, requiring public institutions to remove Francoist iconography from public spaces.
READ MORE: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law
That momentum gathered pace in 2018 when Sánchez, also a Socialist, took office.
The following year, his government exhumed Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen — a vast underground basilica near Madrid — and relocated them to a more discreet family vault to prevent his tomb from becoming a shrine for far-right supporters.
In 2022, a new “Democratic Memory Law” was introduced, to honour victims of the dictatorship and pressure local governments to eliminate regime symbols.
The main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) has opposed the removal of Franco-era symbols, calling them politically motivated and harmful to national unity.
READ ALSO: ‘Franco did it’ – Five interesting ways the dictator shaped modern Spain
