It’s Thursday, 11 AM at the Valley of the Fallen. A gaunt middle-aged man with a yellow t-shirt and black fanny pack waits for the staff to allow visitors to approach the tomb of Francisco Franco. The rosary has just finished with the words “for Spain, its youth, and its families.” As the mass continues, the abbot evokes the martyrs of which he and his fellow Benedictian monks are the custodians. The humidity, which makes the walls sweat, gets into our bones as we wait behind the cordon for the service to end. In the vaults of the crypt below there are more than 20,000 victims of Francoism interred in the same dampness. The chants of the monks and the strong smell of incense add to the oppressive atmosphere. At last the mass finishes and we are ushered in to pay our respects to the dictator.

Spanish history can be grasped through the funeral rites of its protagonists. The great Spanish writer Federico García Lorca was left to rot in an unmarked pit in the hills outside Granada after his assassination by Falangists. Meanwhile, the man responsible for his murder, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, rests in a mausoleum fit for an Egyptian pharaoh. This is a fate quite distinct from the glory afforded other fascist dictators in Europe. Mussolini was strung up outside an Esso gas station near Milan, while the body of Adolf Hitler was burnt with that of Eva Braun in a crater that is now the sandpit of a Berlin playground. But Franco lies in an abbey built by Republican slaves and maintained by public money. And it is no accident. Spain was a fascist anomaly in postwar Europe, which built its democratic order with a strong antifascist component.