A massive crypt penetrates the guts of the Guadarrama Mountains near Madrid. On the bare rock hill that is the basilica’s roof sits a 150-meter tall cross, the biggest in all of Christendom. These massive structures serve as the funerary monument for Francisco Franco Bahamonde, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and more than thirty thousand others who died on both sides of the Spanish Civil War.

The Monumento de los Caídos (“the monument of the fallen”), built by republican, anarchist, and communist prisoners of the dictatorship, represents, for many, the height of Francoism. The cave’s megalomaniacal size, dedicated to death and suffering, certainly creates a horrifying image.

At the same time, however, the monument offers a sanitized version of Franco’s dictatorship: it seems to unambiguously define and therefore exorcise his regime’s evil. For Spanish (and Catalan) liberals, Francoism is the dark past, happily left behind when democracy arrived. For the extreme left, however, democracy only continued dictatorship by other means.