The gates of the suburban mausoleum that could soon house Spain’s most restless ghost are decked with a shrivelling bunch of red and yellow carnations, a handful of prayer cards and a cheap, broken crucifix.
If the socialist government’s long and fraught campaign to exhume Francisco Franco from the fascist splendour of the Valley of the Fallen finally succeeds, his body will be reinterred in June here in the humbler surroundings of the Mingorrubio-El Pardo municipal cemetery.
The graveyard, which sits at the end of a bus route less than an hour from Madrid, lacks the baleful scale of Franco’s current resting place.
Not far from its entrance, Mingorrubio boasts neither the basilica’s sword-wielding angel sentries nor the 150 metre-high cross that draws coachloads of tourists, schoolchildren and those nostalgic for a half-remembered Spain.
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