Fifty years ago, General Francisco Franco died in his bed at El Pardo Palace, outside Madrid, after more than a third of a century ruling Spain with an iron fist. Much has been made of his burial near El Escorial — a symbolic seat of imperial power in Spain’s so-called Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — in the Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum commissioned by the dictator and built by forced prison labor. But Franco’s birthplace of Ferrol is less iconic, despite its influence on his life from cradle to grave.

The second of five children, Francisco Franco Bahamonde was born on December 4, 1892. Spanish children retaining the surnames of both parents made clear that he was the product of the union between two important naval families. As biographer Giles Tremlett notes: “Such things mattered in Ferrol, which lay at the end of a fourteen-kilometer sea loch of the kind that punctuate the Atlantic seaboard of Galicia, in Spain’s rain-lashed north-west corner.”

With a population of 25,000, most of Ferrol’s inhabitants were reliant on fishing, shipbuilding, or the navy to makes end meet. Francisco’s father, Nicolás, saw active service in the Philippines. In 1898, Spain relinquished the final vestiges of its non-African empire with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines to the United States. The defeat, which prompted a national reckoning with what had gone so wrong since the Golden Age, was highly visible in Ferrol: maimed and injured veterans from the Spanish-American War disembarked, while the local economy and employment took a severe blow when vessels were decommissioned.