The Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos around 50 miles northwest of Madrid, deep in the Sierra de Guadaramma mountains is a reminder of Spain’s past that most people here would rather forget.

The 150 metre cross, Europe’s highest, sits a top of the tomb of Generalissimo Fransico Franco a reminder of a man who used a massive propaganda machine to fashion himself as the saviour of a nation.

Ruling Spain with an iron fist from the conclusion of the Civil War in 1939 to his eventual death in 1975, Franco has suffered a revisionism since then equalled only by Stalin’s fall from grace in the Russian national conscience.

Santa Cruz is the only significant reminder of Franco’s 36 year influence on the country. Where once every town of any size had a pristinely looked after statue of the Caudillo, none now remain. All public images of the man who presided over the transformation of Spanish society in the post war years have been removed.

This semi official policy of quietly erasing the memory of the years of the one party state is met with mixed opinion from Spaniards.

For some of the older more conservative generation he is remembered almost fondly as the man who brought stability and respect back to the country and saved Spain from communism.

To anyone under 50 though, he was dictator who could only keep power through the use of brutal repression of his opponents. Thousands were killed or were imprisoned and tortured by his regime with an estimated 200,000 more dying of hunger in the late 1940s thanks largely to his isolationist polices.

The Sierra de Guadramma is excellent mountain walking country but there are few views that don’t include the massive cross to the south.
 
Sitting on a crypt bored 500 metres into the mountain, it’s estimated that 20,000 political prisoners and other opponents worked as enforced labour on the project. There are no records of how many died in its construction.

Plans to visit though are greeted by bewilderment by our Spanish hosts, who try and explain it’s just not the done thing.

On approaching the road to the mausoleum entrance though, we see their point and turn back.

Deciding the five euro entrance fee could be put to better use than subsidising the memory of a man who stole more than £50 million from his own people and made many thousands of them simply disappear.