The Valley of the Fallen

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Shortly after the Spanish Civil War, and amidst WWII, Generalissimo Francisco Franco commissioned what he called “a national act of atonement” to remember the fallen from both sides. Almost 40,000 Nationalist and Republican soldiers are interred here. Over the next two decades, political prisoners were used construct this massive monument on a rocky mountainside. Under a 150 meter cross, the largest in the world, the dictator and his political opponent, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, are buried in simple tombs in a basilica larger than St. Peter'sin Rome. Considered the premier example of Spanish Neo-Herrerian style, a revival of Juan de Herrera's architecture, this distinctly Spanish take on Renaissance architecture was widely used in post-war Spain’s public buildings. On the other side of the mountain, the priests of the Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen say perpetual Masses for fallen Spanish soldiers.