The Valle de los Caídos is a delightful, shallow dip in the folds of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Overlooked by dramatic outcrops of bare granite, it is populated mainly by pines but punctuated by a scattering of oak, ilex and poplar. Driving up the valley road on a wet, windy November afternoon, I was struck by how peaceful this most controversial of places really was. Dog roses and wild thyme lined the road. Signs warned me to drive slowly and be careful not to run over the wild boar, squirrels or other wildlife that inhabit this oasis of protected parkland. The greedy, growing octopus that is greater Madrid felt far away, though its tentacles of housing and office blocks stretch ever closer.

Juanjo, my barber, used to come here for picnics when he was a boy, back in the 1960s and 1970s. His family would look for wild mushrooms under the fallen pine needles. ‘It is a beautiful spot,’ he explained. ‘Even if you don’t like what it stands for.’ And therein lies a problem. For Juanjo was one of the few people I had heard speak well of the Valley of the Fallen. Few of my Madrid friends had ever been here, to one of the most bucolic, verdant spots within striking distance of a city that spends half the year marooned in the middle of a burnt, parched flatland. On later visits I occasionally invited someone to accompany me. ‘¡Ni muerto!’ – ‘Not even when I am dead’ – was a typical, and unconsciously ironic, reply. Not even offering to pay the entrance fee charged by Patrimonio Nacional, the state body that owns this and a dozen parks, palaces and monasteries around the country, would persuade them to go.

The reason for this lies at the end of the five-kilometre road that swings up the valley, through the well-tended pines and across a pair of elegant, stone bridges. For here stands the largest, and most recent, piece of fascist religious monumental architecture to have been erected in western Europe. A huge, blue-grey granite cross soars 150 metres into the sky. The base is planted in the Risco de la Nava, an already imposing outcrop of lichen-clad, brownish rocks, dotted with spindly, buckled-over, wind-tortured trees. Down below, a series of vast, austere, arched galleries have been built against the rock. They overlook a wide, Spartan, featureless esplanade. Between the galleries sit two, relatively small, bronze doors.

Stepping through the doors was an Alice in Wonderland experience. An entirely different world lay on the other side. I had swapped the rugged, natural beauty of the sierra for the damp, echoing chamber of what must be the world’s biggest underground Christian basilica. It tunnels its way through the rock for 260 cold, still metres. An interior dome, lined in gold mosaic, has been hollowed out to a height of twenty-two metres above the granite and black marble floor. The troglodyte basilica – granted the latter status by Pope John XXIII in 1960, the year after the nineteen-year project was finished – is built to the dimensions of the ego of its creator, General Franco. It is, its admirers point out, longer than St Peter’s in the Vatican, and almost as high. Nominally, and according to the literature published by Patrimonio Nacional, it is a monument to all the dead of the Civil War. Damiana González, mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo, had insisted to me that it remained exactly that – a symbol of forgiveness and peace between the two, bitterly opposed, Spains of yesteryear. The bodies of some 40,000 dead were brought here. I could, however, find only two names on the tombstones inside. One was that of the Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera, taken from his Alicante prison cell and shot by the Republicans during the war. The owner of the other one, General Franco, reserved his spot well before his death. ‘When my turn comes, put me here,’ he told the architect, pointing to the floor behind the altar.

I had come here to witness one of the most remarkable ceremonies to be regularly held in a Christian place of worship. Here, on the closest Saturday to after the 20 November anniversary of Franco’s death, the so-called nostálgicos – the few who still feel nostalgia for the Caudillo – gather to pay him homage. I had decided to look for what remained of the most important man in twentieth-century Spain. I should, I had decided, start here. Friends found my interest distasteful, even morbid. Why would I want to go? It would be full of fachas, as they call their home-grown brand of ultra-rightists and fascists, or casposos, literally the dandruff-ridden, they said. I might as well have been consorting with the living dead. But I wanted to see this unique conjunction of Roman Catholic and fascist ceremonial for myself.

The first surprise was that, on this day, the state waives the fee it normally charges drivers at the entrance gate. Authorities justified this because a religious service was being held. The car park was full to overflowing, even on a rain-drenched, stormy day. ‘Silence in this sacred place,’ ordered a sign at the basilica entrance. But this was a day of exceptions. Nobody was going to enforce the rule. The basilica was awash with the banners and flags of the Falange and other historic, far-right organisations. Young boys dressed in white cassocks sat primly in the choir stalls. Benedictine monks, also dressed in white, were led by the Abbot in his dazzling mitre.

When I arrived, holy communion was already being offered to, and received by, many of the 1,000-plus people who had come here to pay tribute to the Caudillo. Some were blue-shirted Falangists or young skinheads, but most were not. Place them anywhere else, indeed, and it would have been almost impossible to tell them apart from any other group of Spaniards. There was, perhaps, a higher than usual density of hair oil and Barbour-style jackets – trademarks of the conservative upper-class Spanish youth, the pijo – on display amongst the younger men. And there were more pastel-coloured lambswool jumpers and Hermes or Burberry scarves, trademarks of his partner, the pija, than the average group of Spaniards might display. But there were also the full range of classes and ages. Small children ran around excitedly, wearing Franco-era Spanish flags decorated with sinister black eagles as if they were Batman capes.

The star of the show, however, was Franco’s daughter Carmen, the Duquesa de Franco – a woman once discovered, several years after her father’s death, trying to take gold coins out of the country. When the religious service ended, half of the congregation headed for the hole in the rock that would let them out onto the vast, windswept esplanade. The other half, however, crowded forward to where the Duquesa could be found. Banners were held aloft, some adorned with the Cross of St James, known as ‘Matamoros’, the ‘Moorslayer’. Others carried the Falange’s yoke and arrows. Those on the fringes of the crowd clambered up the steps of the choir stalls, craning necks to get a view of the lump of granite in the floor behind the altar that is Franco’s tomb. In a question of minutes, the transformation of this Christian temple from place of worship to political parade ground was absolute. Arms were thrown out and held stiffly in place. ‘¡Viva Franco!’ came the shouts, followed by ‘¡España una, grande y libre!’ (‘Spain, one, great and free’). The crowd continued on through the panoply of old Francoist chants. There was a bellowed rendition of the Falange’s ‘Cara al Sol’ anthem, promising that death for the cause will be rewarded by the return of banderas victoriosas, the flags of victory.

After a few minutes of this, the Duquesa moved slowly along the tunnel followed by a small court of elderly, diminutive men. Anxious to see her close up, I found myself swept along just a pace behind her. ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’ the clutch of excited, red-faced men beside her shouted, their arms raised. Suddenly, as we neared the exit, I found myself accompanying her through a tunnel of raised arms and shouting, chanting voices. The echoes rolled back off the underground walls, multiplying the voices. For a moment, the awe and exhilaration of fascist ceremonialism ran through me. Franco’s Spanish brand of fascism differed from those espoused by Hitler or Mussolini and had plenty of time to evolve into something else. His, and the Falange’s, sense of ceremony was relatively limited but it came directly from the same school. I felt as though I had time-warped my way back into a black-and-white newsreel to the era of the goose-step, the mass rally and the cult of personality.

I slipped sideways through the raised arms and was just as quickly returned to reality. In fact, there were only a couple of hundred people chanting here. The Duquesa and her little party walked out onto the vast, dark esplanade – distant lightning flashes adding suitable drama to the scenario. They diminished so quickly in size that, within a minute, they looked like a small clutch of elderly pensioners lost in a storm. I wanted to rush over and offer an umbrella, or an arm to hold, in case they slipped on the sheets of water racing across the flagstones or were blown off their feet by the gale. But two minders with Francoist armbands were in attendance. A chauffeur-driven, plum-coloured Rolls-Royce, I was told, waited for them somewhere in the driving rain. The nostálgicos, meanwhile, gathered for a bit more singing under the arches outside the basilica. A handful of German skinheads looked on. Then the nostálgicos headed for the car park, drove down the road and disappeared out of sight for another year.

That, bar a few small demonstrations and even smaller political meetings, is all that Francisco Franco, Caudillo de Dios y de la Patria, gets thirty years after his peaceful, natural death.

The contrast between the Franco regime’s view of its own historical import and the way it is treated today could not be greater. The Valley, after all, is an imposing, arrogant reminder of victory, of the Caudillo’s visceral sense of the right of conquest. Grey, grim and intimidating, it is designed to inspire awe, respect and obedience. And that – or at least the first part of it – it still achieves. On those crystal-clear days that the thin air of Madrid, Europe’s highest major capital, is famous for producing, it can be seen, thirty miles away (fifty kilometres), from the city itself. It is an uncomfortable, and largely unwanted, reminder that Franco may be dead, but his spirit is still out there somewhere.

Just a few miles along the Sierra de Guadarrama, at El Escorial, lies another cold, vast and imposing construction. The royal monastery of El Escorial was built in the sixteenth century by Philip II. V. S. Pritchett called Philip’s favourite building ‘the oppressive monument of the first totalitarian state in Europe’ and the ‘mausoleum of Spanish power’. From here the austere and suspicious monarch tried to administer the myriad lands received from his father, the Emperor Charles V. These, with the addition of his own aquisitions, stretched from Holland and southern Italy to North Africa, Latin America and the Philippines. His was the original empire on which the sun never set. That empire, however, did not last. Its gradual decline from the end of the sixteenth century would continue until the days of Franco’s own childhood with the disastrous loss, in 1898, of Cuba and the Philippines. To Franco, however, its prison-like walls and monolithic, dull exterior must have seemed the very expression of Castilian military virility and religious might. His own crusade would, he thought, re-establish some of that glorious past. The Valley, too, he decreed, must have ‘the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness’.

Franco’s court of adulators sometimes compared him to Philip, the counter-reformation zealot and man who sent the Spanish Armada to its stormy, watery grave in the Atlantic. Philip was not his only company. El Cid, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and the Archangel Gabriel – to mention a few – were all named as the Caudillo’s historic equals. Visitors looking for a simplistic psychological explanation for the Valley may be tempted to speculate about small men and large objects. But Franco knew that the bigger and more impressive the monument, the longer his name would last. The Valley was his great passion. It was the not-so-secret other love of a man said to have observed, otherwise, rigorous sexual fidelity. Everything here is built to impress. From the cross and the basilica to the bleak esplanade and a similarly regimented square behind the Risco – home to a Benedectine monastery, a choir school and a large guest house – all here is large and imposing. The scale and drama of the Valley of the Fallen guarantee the name of Francisco Franco will survive for centuries. It was, from the Caudillo’s point of view, a good decision. For Spaniards have, otherwise, done all they can to wipe out his imprint.

In physical terms, the Valley of the Fallen is virtually all that remains of Franco. It is an amazing disappearing act, further evidence of the power of forgetting in Spain. For Franco, or, more precisely, Francoism, has been condemned to the ignominy of silent disdain. ‘By tacit national consent, the regime was relegated to oblivion,’ says Franco’s best-known biographer, Paul Preston.

Historians cannot be blamed for this. Dozens of biographies and memoirs of those who knew him have been written. Ever since his death, however, the Franco name has become, in the English sense, an F-word. To be called a Francoist or a facha is, almost without exception, an insult. To admit in public to the slightest grain of respect or admiration for Franco is to be a political outcast. This is despite, or perhaps because of, the attempts of a handful of Franco diehards who still see him in terms of the hagiography of his own times. One Benedictine, while I was writing this book, even suggested he should be a candidate for beatification. There can be no real debate about Franco in Spain. He is either black or white, bad or good. There is no grey area in between.

Nowhere is the silence more eloquent than in the state-owned gift shop at the Valley of the Fallen. There are only two guidebooks on sale here. One is a cheap picture book. The other is written by the state body that owns it, Patrimonio Nacional. One does not even mention the fact that Republican prisoners-of-war were used to build the Valley. The other observes, briefly, that prisoners-of-war could redeem part of their sentence by working here. Neither mentions that more than a dozen labourers died here. They also, however, keep mentions of Franco himself to a bare minimum.

The handful of references to him talk, coyly, of ‘the former head of state’. Photographs of the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera are curiously absent. The books provide, instead, illustrations of the bulgingly muscular set of sculptures known as the Allegory to the Armed Forces or the religious tapestries hanging on the wall. Patrimonio Nacional, explaining its own existence, says it looks after ‘palaces, monasteries and convents founded by Spanish monarchs’. It is difficult to see how this place, founded by a dictator, fits.

The gift shop sells Valley key rings, pens, T-shirts, coasters and thimbles. But it does not have any of the books written by, or about, the prisoners who worked and, in some cases, died building the place. Nor is there a single book on Franco or Primo de Rivera.

Unsure what to do with it, successive governments have tried to take the meaning out of the Valley of the Fallen. It is as if the monument had appeared here innocently, and neutrally, out of the blue. There is, their silence suggests, nothing shocking, awesome or even significant about it.

Thirty years after the Caudillo’s death, a new Socialist government has finally suuggested it would like to tell the full story of the Valley of the Fallen. It may build a visitors’ centre here, devoted to the Civil War. There is no sign, yet, however, of any real change.

I set out to find people who had helped build the Valley. I found two of them. Both, for very different reasons, were sure that it oozed with meaning: malicious for one, glorious for the other.

Diego Márquez Horrillo was a genuine volunteer, a convinced Falangist who would come here during the summer vacations from his university law degree. To him it is, principally, the resting place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera – a man he still reveres as father, in the 1930s, of ‘the most modern of all political ideas’. He enjoyed those summers in the hills, where he would marvel at the ingenuity of it all. ‘It was an extraordinary project,’ he told me in the small Madrid office which is half his law practice and half headquarters of one tiny fragment of what little remains of the Falange. ‘I was excited to be involved.’

Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz was another sort of ‘volunteer’. He was one of the political prisoners sent here with the promise of a meagre one peseta a day in a savings account, and the chance of reducing his sentence. He is now an emeritus professor at New York University. I found him at a conference in Barcelona where, for almost the first time since Franco’s death, academics were discussing the full extent of a vast prison system though which some 200,000 people – 2 per cent of the male population – passed. Sánchez-Albornoz was sent here in 1948 after being arrested as a student agitator. The cheap labour he and tens of thousands of prison workers around Spain provided would help found the fortunes of several major construction companies. Mussolini’s foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, already shocked by the vast numbers being executed in 1939, found the concentration camps full ‘not of prisoners of war, but slaves of war’.

Sánchez-Albornoz saw how food destined for the prisoners never made it beyond the camp gates. The director, like many officials during the first decade of Franco’s rule, was getting rich off black-market trading. The state, meanwhile, paid itself for the prisoners’ upkeep by taking 80 per cent of an already miserable wage. There were no prison fences here, as there was nowhere to go. Sánchez-Albornoz was one of the few prisoners who dared escape. More than fifty years later, he refuses to go back to Cuelgamuros, the finca where the basilica was built. ‘I loathe Cuelgamuros. I refuse to put my feet on what, before it was profaned, was a beautiful piece of land … unless the crypt is given a different use and now, given my age, that there is also a urinal on Franco’s grave so that I can relieve my prostate,’ he says. ‘With a little more money, and he had plenty of that, he might have hired free workers and avoided the imprint of revenge … His remains are buried in a monument to cruelty and corruption.’

The Valley of the Fallen may have survived, but most other physical proof of Franco’s, and Francoism’s, existence has been wiped from the face of Spain. Major cities like Madrid or Barcelona returned their Avenidas del Generalísimo, their Plazas del Caudillo or their Plazas Francisco Franco to their original names in the 1970s. A single remaining public statue of Franco in Madrid was removed, under cover of darkness, shortly before this book was published. A few months earlier I had gone to look at it. Franco sat astride his horse, but those who did not know who he was could not have guessed. It was a statue without a plaque. I bumped into a Spanish history graduate beside it and asked her whether she thought it should still be here. ‘I don’t like Franco,’ she replied. ‘But I think we should remember he existed, just so we do not make the same mistake again.’ The Socialist government that ordered its removal obviously disagreed. A triumphal arch and couple of streets named after lesser Francoist generals are now all that remain in Madrid to commemorate that period of history.

When the author and journalist Arcadi Espada went looking for the public remnants of Franco several years ago he found that, with a few exceptions, they had disappeared. Of Spain’s provincial capitals only Santander was still festooned with Franco memorabilia, despite pressure from historians for it to be removed. ‘Even the whores and beggars are rightists in Santander,’ explained the writer Jesús Pardo.

Franco’s birthplace of Ferrol, a navy port in Galicia that became known as El Ferrol del Caudillo, waited almost thirty years but eventually also removed its equestrian statue from the central Plaza de España. A People’s Party councillor tried to save it, calling for a popular referendum, but had her wrists slapped by party bosses. Not even the party that wins the votes of the old franquistas dares show active support for him, or his memory. By the time I visited Ferrol, the statue had gone. The statue, which was later discreetly sent to a naval museum, had been placed in a municipal store.

Espada says that sums up exactly what Spaniards have done with Franco. They have shoved him into storage. He has been placed out of sight and, largely, out of mind. ‘In reality, with museums and the street out of the question, the storeroom is exactly where Spain has placed Franco. It is a jumbled, dusty, indeterminate place, somewhere without criteria. Franco showed that the best thing to do with a difficult problem was to shove it into [the back of] a drawer. That is where he is right now.’

Sometimes the solution has been more radical. On a visit to Guadalajara province, I stopped on a road near Torija at a ridge overlooking the plain where the River Henares flows. Here, on the roadside, I discovered a pile of broken, honey-coloured stone, looking like the rubble from some ancient building site. Turning the stones over, however, I found the smashed fragments of a huge, carved Francoist shield. These must have been torn off a local town hall after Franco’s death. They had been dumped at the roadside – another anonymous, indeterminate place for the remains of Francoism.

The business of wiping out Franco’s physical imprint has been long and slow. There are still a dozen villages, mainly founded during his life near dams or other public works, which will for ever be Franco’s. Alberche del Caudillo and Llanos del Caudillo are just two of them – though others, like Barbate and Ferrol, have returned to their original names.

Not everyone, however, embraced the first wave of name-changes and statue removals. A young politician called José María Aznar complained in the La Nueva Rioja newspaper in 1979 that town councils were removing the honours and street names of ‘the former Head of State who, although it obviously bothers some people, governed for forty years and was called Francisco Franco’.

‘Instead of devoting themselves to improving their municipalities, they spend their time rubbing away history,’ wrote Aznar. Seventeen years later, as Spanish prime minister, he would avoid, as far as possible, even mentioning Franco’s name.

Some right-wing mayors agreed with Aznar and refused point blank to rename their squares and avenues. They can still be found, normally in small towns and villages of what was once ‘zona nacional’ – the western half of Spain that fell almost immediately to the right’s rebellion.

I only had to travel a few miles south from the mass grave near Poyales del Hoyo to find an example. In the small town of Navalcán, as in many pueblos, the contrast between old and new was immediate. Here old women dressed in black still sat out in small groups on the pavements on low, wood and wicker chairs. Broad straw hats kept the sun off them as they sewed or embroidered. The Socialist mayor of this town of 2,300 people was just twenty-five years old. He was not just the youngest mayor in living history, he was also the first left-wing mayor since before 1936. This was a child of Spain’s democratic transition. He had no memory or first-hand knowledge of Franco or Francoism.

During the Franco years Navalcán had been governed by a series of mayors who were the natural heirs of the old caciques, the local political strongmen who had traditionally controlled the Spanish countryside. It remained right-wing after his death.

The arrival of a Socialist mayor had been a major event. It was also an eye-opener for the young mayor. ‘Some elderly people insisted on congratulating me in private. They did not want others to see them doing it. They still thought there might be something to be afraid of,’ he said.

An elderly man with a Valencian accent came and sat with us. He was the town’s former bank manager, a former clerk to the local priest and self-appointed local historian. He pointed to a white-painted three-storey building on the far side of the square. ‘That is where one of the mayors would rape the girls,’ he whispered. ‘His illegitimate children are still here. In this town, all we have to do is look into people’s faces to know where they come from.’ His story may well have been a local myth. It summed up, however, the combined feelings of fear and acquiescence in places where Francoism conferred extraordinary power on its local representatives.

In Navalcán it was still possible, stepping out of the town hall, to go for a circular walk without leaving for more than a few moments the streets with Francoist names. The walk took you through the Plaza General Franco and streets dedicated to General Yagüe, the Defenders of the Alcázar (a fortress in nearby Toledo) and General Queipo de Llano.

Born after Franco died, the young mayor’s generation had learnt the basic facts of his life and times at school, but little more. Now, however, he was being forced to catch up on some local history. Several graves of those shot by Quinientos Uno had been located nearby and there was talk of digging them up. There were also proposals for changing some, or all, of the streets back to the original names they had borne for centuries. Those proposals had, in turn, caused a stink in the town. It was unclear what would happen. But there was no doubt that, here at least, Franco’s ghost was still about.

Santos Juliá, a prominent historian, sums up Spain’s attitude to its former dictator like this: ‘Spaniards have an ambiguous valuation of Franco. They do not satanizan, (literally diabolicalise), him like the Germans do with Hitler. Perhaps that is due to the fact that most living adults do not remember the worst years of the thirties and forties, rather they remember the fifties, sixties and seventies … And they recall that in the second half of Francoism there was a lack of freedom but also an improvement in the material quality of life.’

When he first attained power Franco embarked on a disastrous drive for autarky, of proud national self-reliance. He blamed the failure of that not on rampant corruption and his own regime but on an international plot of freemasons, communists and so-called false democracies – meaning Britain, France and the US. Eventually, he handed the economy over to technocrats, many of them from the austere Opus Dei Catholic movement. The result was an opening up to the world and a chance to start playing catch-up with the rest of Europe. The economy eventually boomed, giving rise to what became known as the ‘años de desarrollo’, ‘years of development’. From 1961 to 1973 Spain’s economy grew by 7 per cent a year. In the developed world, only Japan was growing quicker. Incomes quadrupled. This, in turn, helped produce what came to be referred to as ‘franquismo sociológico’. In other words, Franco became – admittedly to a degree that was never formally measured – popular in some parts of Spanish society. This was because, in a country which had suffered from famine, hunger, war and need for the best part of two decades, life suddenly, and rapidly, got better. ‘After all, Franco did not rule by repression alone: he enjoyed a considerable popular support,’ comments Preston. This, he adds, was largely due to ‘the passive support of those who had been conditioned into political apathy by political repression, the controlled media and an appallingly inadequate state education system’.

Just how popular Franco was, is, of course, impossible to say. Manuel Jiménez de Parga, head of the country’s Constitutional Court, caused a stink by claiming the ‘immense majority’ of Spaniards were franquistas. It was one of the least politically correct – and most debatable – commentaries on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the constitution in 2003. True or not, most Spaniards do not want to believe that about themselves, or about their parents and grandparents. It would imply that, somehow, they had supported or collaborated with the dictator. Judge Jiménez de Parga’s view, however exaggerated, would certainly explain why up to half a million Spaniards queued up to pay their last respects to him as his coffin lay in state in 1975.

It also, however, raised a difficult question. If the country’s senior judge was right, or even partially so, where were all those franquistas now?

If finding physical proof of Franco’s existence proved nearly impossible, finding those willing to defend his name – or admit that they themselves had supported him – proved even harder. I had gone to Márquez Horrillo because I thought his branch of the Falange, the long-winded Falange Española de las JONS, might provide some examples. But it turned out that not only did Márquez barely have any support, he did not really consider himself a Francoist either.

In private, Márquez Horrillo turned out to be a lonely, gentle, polite old man still suffering after the recent death of his wife. I was the first foreign journalist to interview him, the ‘national leader’and direct heir to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, in over twenty years. That alone was proof of how marginal the once powerful Falange had become. Franco, he said, had betrayed the Falange, using it as an instrument for keeping power and debasing its principles. Primo de Rivera, he insisted, had been a visionary and a revolutionary.

At a campaign meeting for his party at Madrid local elections only one hundred people turned up. A similar number of police stood guard outside the school where the meeting was held. We watched a film of Primo de Rivera giving the 1933 speech, at Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia, when he founded the Falange and warned that it would use ‘knuckles and pistols’. The occasion ended, once more, with stiff arms and a rendition of the ‘Cara al Sol’. It was distinctly uncomfortable to be the only person in the audience not standing and singing.

Real Falangism, with its talk of nationalising banks and empowering workers, had gone to the grave with Primo de Rivera in 1936, just three years after he thought it up. Falangism, with its ideas of an ‘organic democracy’ representing families, trades and professsions, villages and towns, had been the last great political theory of the twentieth century, Horrillo said. It is one which, curiously, inspired a political movement in the Lebanon which would also be known as Falangism. Talk of knuckles and pistols, Horrillo claimed, was simply standard for the time and place. It was not relevant to today.

Other Falangist groups I tracked down proved more adoring of Franco, though hardly more popular. Some were barely concealed fronts for right-wing thuggery. These recruited amongst the skinheads of Real Madrid’s violent, racist Ultra Sur supporters and other gangs of football hooligans. Others were serious-minded radicals. I went to see a small, rag-tag crowd of them gather on a chilly street corner outside the National Court in the Calle Genóva on 19 November. Here they listened to José Cantalapiedra, a young Falangist leader with a black leather jacket and film-star looks. Cantalapiedra delivered a speech through a crackling microphone. He denounced Spain’s democratic governments, Basque and Catalan separatism, immigration, abortion, globalisation, banks and liberal capitalism. When he had finished, the crowd of a few hundred set off on an all-night walk to the Valley of the Fallen, carefully marshalled by several vanloads of police. It was one of the biggest dates in the Falange calendar. Yet, in a city whose streets are daily blocked by marchers of one kind or another, they occupied just a hundred metres of bus lane.

Francoism, as a political concept, is long dead. Some argue that it never really existed as a properly defined ideology. Franco simply amalgamated all the right-wing and conservative elements of Spanish society – be they the army, the Church, the monarchists, Carlists, the landowners or the Falange – and did his best to stop them squabbling amongst themselves. Historians have pointed out that the cause of Francoism is best described ‘in negatives – what they were against’. Marxists, freemasons, free-thinkers and separatists formed an eclectic group of enemies. Franco’s early admiration for totalitarianism gave way, with the opposition either wiped out or left too cowed to act, to a form of authoritarian pragmatism. The brutal early repression has been described as ‘a kind of political investment, a bankable terror, which accelerated the process of Spain’s depoliticisation’.

Franco’s main achievement was to stay in power, something he managed by force and instinct. His political philosophy, ‘National Catholicism’, was, as the name implies, mainly about patriotism and God. His main rule was that of obedience, to Church and State. It was hardly a recipe for major change in Spain. Along the way, however, the Generalísimo inoculated several generations of Spaniards against the extreme right. Their parties have never gained more than 2 per cent of the vote in the three decades since his death.

There seemed to be something deeply ironic about the silence into which Francoism had been buried. For the Caudillo was, himself, an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does,’ he once warned his self-designated successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives’ resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than discovering a necio, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.’

This particular facet of the Caudillo’s character is attributed to his origins in the wet, green, north-western Atlantic province of Galicia. Gallegos are meant to be famous for something called retranca, a sort of deliberate ambivalence or avoidance of committing themselves. Franco was retranca personified. He rarely let on what he was thinking, even to his ministers. His mysteriousness kept those around him on their toes. It allowed his propagandists to construct a mythical persona of wisdom, bravery, self-sacrifice and godliness. It also allowed Franco to reinvent himself continually, from Hitler ally to cunning evader of the Second World War or from Crusader to benign and loving patriarch. It also allowed his followers to blame the regime’s failings on those around him. Ultimately, critics claim, it allowed him to hide his own mediocrity. He was, one of his former ministers admitted, ‘a sphinx without a secret’.

His regime was also a great enforcer of silence. To the silence forced on the vencidos, the defeated, was added the silence enforced by the censors, both political and religious. One of the first to fall victim was the seventy-two-year-old philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. He, at the height of the Civil War, told an audience of senior Francoists that ‘You will win but you will not convince.’ The retort from General José Millán Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion in which Franco had won his military honours as a fearless and ruthless young officer, was ‘¡Abajo la inteligencia!’ (‘Down with intellectuals!’ or ‘Down with intelligence!’). Unamuno, one of the few great minds left in Nationalist Spain, was removed from his position as Rector of Salamanca university and died soon afterwards. The British writer Gerald Brenan, travelling in 1949, found much of the country suffering famine, while the regime’s apparatchiks got rich off the black market. The press, meanwhile, carried virtually no news about Spain. A newspaper reader ‘might well suppose that nothing happens in the Peninsula except football matches, religious ceremonies and bullfights’. Censorship would slacken over the years, but it remained in place – in one form or another – until Franco’s death.

The one-sided view of a regime which ruled by right of conquest was reflected, most of all, in schools. Spaniards have recently found a rich, deep vein of humour in the absurd things taught to them by the Franco regime.

In Otones, a small farming village on the parched plain outside Segovia, locals have turned the former schoolhouse into a tiny museum to the education they received under el Caudillo. Alicia, a friend from the village, showed me around after one of those traditional Sunday feasts beloved of Madrileños of roast kid and local wine – pointing out the antiquated text books and the propaganda on the wall. The museum is there to laugh at. So, too, are the recently reprinted Francoist school textbooks (which have provided a small publishing boom and spawned films, like El Florido Pensil, based on them). These remind Spaniards of how they once learned that Franco was ‘a new El Cid, the saviour of Spain’. They contain such edifying teachings as: ‘Stimulants like coffee, tobacco, alcohol, newspapers, politics, cinema and luxury undermine us and waste our bodies away’; or ‘women have never discovered anything. They lack the creative talent, which God has reserved for men’; and ‘a wife has no rights over her own body. On marriage she gives up those rights to her husband. He is the only one who can use those rights and only for reproduction.’

When General Franco died in 1975 the half a million people who queued up to pay their respects were not there, as the joke went, to check that he really was dead. Nor was it simply one of those occasions when Spaniards, often obstinate individualists when faced with authority, indulged their passion for doing things en masse. Bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, were broken open in some homes where the dictator’s death seemed long overdue. ‘Above the skyline of the Collserola mountains, champagne corks soared into the Autumn twilight. But nobody heard a sound,’ writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said of his home city, Barcelona. There was also a genuine outpouring of grief. Most of those who mourned, however, reneged on the Generalísimo long ago. The rest have, quite simply, sunk into silence.

I found a few clues as to where they were, however, in my own Madrid neighbourhood. The most startling example came when I was shown an apartment in a street not far from the Retiro park by a smart Argentine woman who said she ‘liked to help friends sell their houses’.

‘You might not like the decoration,’ she warned. ‘These are elderly people with elderly peoples’ tastes.’

At first sight there was nothing special about the décor, which showed the same taste for heavy wooden furniture, old leather, wooden crosses and fake papyrus lamp shades I had encountered in many other homes. Walking into the sitting room, however, I found myself gasping, involuntarily, with shock. The room was dominated by a life-size oil portrait of a man in a Second World War German military uniform. Adolf Hitler stared out at me, a slight smile under his trademark moustache, wearing a field greatcoat and with something like a map case clutched in his hands.

The effect, for this anglosajón, was like being punched on the nose. One of the greatest practitioners of genocide of the past century was a daily companion for the owners of this house. Even more bizarrely, however, the woman showing us around simply considered this a case of ‘old-fashioned’ décor.

Unable to speak, I looked around me, taking in a glass cabinet containing an Iron Cross and a red (Falange or Carlist) beret and, to confuse me further, a photograph of the current king, Juan Carlos. My journalistic instinct should have led to a thorough quizzing of the ‘estate agent’ about who her friends were. Instead, I pushed my two small children out of the door and fled onto the street without even bothering to check the names on the mail-boxes in the reception hall downstairs. I was perplexed. It was not just the presence of a symbol which would turn the owner of any house in London, Paris or Berlin into a social pariah, but also the strange mixture of symbols. It was also the casual acceptance that this was just ‘old-fashioned décor’. Hitler, Juan Carlos, Iron Crosses and red berets just did not seem to make sense to me. It would take me a while to work out how they might fit together.

A few months later I went to the Gran Peña club on Madrid’s Gran Vía, the city’s answer to Oxford Street or Shaftesbury Avenue. Roughly equivalent to a traditional London club, its members, many of them former military officers, had erected a bust of Franco in 1992. That was seventeen years after his death and the same year that ‘modern’ Spain was busy promoting itself at an Expo fair in Seville, at the Barcelona Olympic Games and during Madrid’s turn as the European Union’s ‘cultural capital’ for a year. The occasion was a public appearance by Blas Piñar, the virulently right-wing leader (and editor) of Fuerza Nueva, a neo-Francoist party that disbanded in 1982. The recalcitrant Blas Piñar was famous in the final days of Francoism for his denunciations of left-leaning priests. He was also one of the inspirations, if not fathers, of a gang of right-wing thugs called ‘The Guerrilleros of Cristo Rey’, who had attacked left-wingers in the 1970s (and 1980s). A handful of tall, shaven-headed young Germans stood respectfully in the crowded room as Blas Piñar, a gifted orator, railed against Spain’s young democracy. His speech was peppered with references to the saints and quotations from the bible, a large number of which he obviously held in his head.

At the end of the talk I met General Chicharro. He was a polite, pleasant man, the archetype of what I had come to call ‘a friendly fascist’. This was a nickname I applied to the impeccably-mannered, if somewhat worrying, old rightists I had started coming across in my own barrio. He was also, at the time, president of the Brotherhood of the División Azul – a division of Francosponsored Spanish volunteers that had donned German uniform and gone to fight for Hitler on the eastern front. After a long battle with Spain’s defence ministry, the families of the Blue Division veterans were beginning to dig up the graves of their dead and bring them home. The funds given to them by the Defence ministry would become a sore point for those paying from their own pockets for mechanical diggers to find the remains left behind by Franco’s death squads.

Chicharro told me about a recent visit to Russia where bottles of vodka had finally broken the ice between the Spanish Hitler veterans, the Germans they had fought alongside and their old Russian opponents. It was a pleasant tale of reconciliation between old adversaries. Before I left, however, he wanted me to know something: ‘Those of us who went,’ he said proudly, ‘we still think exactly the same as we did back then.’

The members of the División Azul won Iron Crosses, admired Hitler and wore the red Falangist beret. Some of them must have been close to Juan Carlos while Franco oversaw his education and he dutifully fulfilled his obligations as the anointed successor-in-waiting. The king probably courted some of them during the transition to democracy – trying to ensure their loyalty to him and to the new Spanish state. They had been privileged members of Francoist society, guaranteed jobs and prestige on their return (though many never returned and some were not freed from Russian prison camps until the mid-1950s, causing Franco to pull Spain out of the first European Nations soccer cup in 1960 when drawn to meet the USSR in the quarter finals). The owner of the Hitler portrait, I suspected, had been one of them.

It turned out that General Chicharro was from my barrio. He was not the only one. Angelines, the bed-ridden old woman who lived opposite us when we moved in, had been a División Azul nurse.

This is not surprising. My building, and many of the neighbouring ones, went up in the 1940s – a period when few of those who were not Franco supporters were in a position to be buying apartments. The original owners are dying off now – Angelines was carried off in a stretcher down the communal staircase and died a few days later in hospital. In the space of just three years she has been followed by Dr Bueno and charming old Paco, who would take his dog out for a walk every night but only, as far as I could tell, to the Bar Goyesca, just a twenty-yard walk away.

The stereotypical elderly, well-off Francoist couple steps out on a winter’s day with the lady immaculately coiffured and made up, wearing her fur-coat. The man, his upper lip adorned with a pencil-thin moustache, wears a bottle-green, Austrian-style, pressed wool jacket. Such types can still be found occasionally in my local newspaper shop buying ABC or La Razon, two conservative Spanish daily newspapers. I suspect some of the surviving older people in my block were, or still are, Franco supporters of some kind. At least one is said to have a Falangist flag on his desk. A Franco portrait appeared on a balcony across the road on the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 2005. The old lady who lived beneath us when we moved occasionally muttered that ‘things were better under Franco’. Usually, however, these old Franquistas are silent, and thus unquantifiable. Some see no conflict between Franco and democracy, believing that one was the direct result of the other. Franco, they reason, cured the divide between the two Spains so that, after his death, they could come together again in peace and join the club of free European nations. He was, they claim, more successful in producing a united country than that other long-lived European strongman and contemporary, Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito.

These were amongst the people who helped place Pío Moa’s revisionist The Myths of the Civil War on the best-sellers list. ‘Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution … Undoubtedly he was right,’ Moa argues. ‘His regime saved Spain from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy.’ Moa blames modern right-wing politicians for not defending the Generalísimo’s reputation. ‘The right will swallow anything, just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist,’ he observes.

Moa, the nostálgicos and a handful of neo-Francoists aside, one is hard put to find a Spaniard spontaneously prepared to defend Franco in public – with the eternal exception of the odd Madrid taxi driver. Mostly, they keep their appreciation of the Generalísi-mo to themselves and their friends. I even know one, a publishing proofreader, who refuses to vote because he dislikes Spain’s new democracy, but dutifully turned up when called on to serve at a polling station at election time. Their silence, broken by a handful of mainly elderly writers and historians, is appreciated.

It has also, until recently, been matched by the silence surrounding that other uncomfortable reminder of Franco’s existence, his victims – both the living and the dead. As they grow in confidence, but decline rapidly in numbers, the victims have slowly raised their heads in recent years. Their stories, deliberately forgotten and buried during the transition to democracy, are a belated reminder of how the Caudillo ensured he could die, still in power, in his bed.

Mariano called me from Candeleda. He was hugely excited. ‘We are going to pay homage to a great freedom fighter, a true hero, one of the few men prepared to risk their lives to fight Franco,’ he announced. The hero’s name was Gerardo Donate, alias Tito, a local leader of the maquis guerrilla movement that, briefly and to no great effect, acted across much of Spain in the 1940s and early 1950s. Tito had led the guerrillas of the Gredos mountains and had died in a shoot-out by the River Alardos, which separates the Extremadura region from Castilla y León. His family, now living in Valencia, had only just discovered what happened to him. The family was on its way – typically, by the coachload – to pay its respects at the place where he died. This was a picturesque pool in one of the mountain streams that bring the snow-melt rushing down through a series of gargantas – the streams known literally as ‘throats’ – cut into the southern slopes of Gredos. The pool has popularly been known as ‘El Charco de los Maquis’, ‘The Maquis’ Pool’, ever since.

I was curious. Here, after all, were a group of resistance fighters who had fought a right-wing dictatorial regime run by an ally of Hitler and Mussolini. As a child in 1960s and 1970s Britain, I had grown up enthralled by tales of men and women like this. In comics, trash mags, films and cheap novels the resistance fighters of France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece had often been there as the key, heroic supporters to some frightfully brave, and slightly sentimental, British hero. Even today, these loyal partisans occasionally raise their heads in British novels – such as Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray.

In most countries the resistance members remain national heroes. They have medals, monuments and museums. Yet, in the Spanish mind, the maquis have largely been forgotten. A handful of ex-fighters, local historians and people on the far left kept their memory from disappearing. They had no place, however, in the pantheon of national heroes. Not even those socialists who had worn their anti-Francoism as a badge of identity and pride in the 1960s and 1970s, and had gone on to run democratic Spain in the 1980s, had bothered with this group of ageing, defeated men and women. Ironically, some of them, exiled from Franco’s Spain, could claim hero status in France, having fought with the Resistance there in the Second World War. The tanks that led the Free French into liberated Paris in 1944 bore the names of Spanish cities and pueblos such as Zaragoza, Guadalajara and Belchite, and were manned by Spaniards.

Although some Republican fighters had survived in small groups in the sierras as fugitives, they did not become organised until late in the Second World War. Franco’s opponents became convinced that, with Hitler and Mussolini on the run, it would not be long before the Allies turned their attention to Europe’s other major right-wing dictator. Organised by the Spanish Communist Party, they set up a network whose principal aim was to be in place when the British, French and Americans invaded.

But, just as Britain and the other allies had abandoned the Republic to its fate during the Civil War while Hitler and Mussolini sent troops and money to Franco, so they turned their backs on these appeals for the ‘liberation’ of Spain. No British heroes would be parachuted in here. The Caudillo, instead, would become an early Cold War winner, a right-wing bulwark against the Communist Warsaw Pact countries. Initially a rabid anti-American, he considered the new superpower ‘childish’. But he was wily enough to seal a lifelong grip on power in 1953 by signing a deal that gave the United States air bases on Spanish soil. This, he later observed, appeared to have emptied ‘Madrid bars and cabarets of whores, since they almost all marry American sergeants or GIs’.

An invasion of Spain did eventually take place. Led by many of those French resistance heroes, it was launched in the Val d’Aran, a north-facing part of the Pyrenees that is Spanish territory and which boasts its own version of the Gascon language, Aranese. The invasion’s planners had hoped the sight of troops coming across the border would encourage a popular uprising. No such thing happened. The Spanish, it seems, were either more tired of war than they were of Franco or were so downtrodden after half a dozen years of vengeful rule that nobody dared lift a finger.

I met Tito’s family at a restaurant near the ‘Lobera’ (‘the wolf ’s lair’) – a place where the wolves of Gredos had once roamed freely. They were toying with a paella, wondering why, as Valencians, they were being served up a mediocre dish of what is a speciality in their own region. They had hired a coach and set out at 6 a.m. to get here for an afternoon of ceremonies before setting off again, at nightfall, for the six-hour return trip.

‘He was one of three brothers separated by the Civil War who never saw each others’ faces again,’ said his great nephew Enrique, a paid-up member (and local councillor back in his home town near Valencia) of Spain’s communist-led United Left coalition. ‘One brother fled to France and was killed there fighting for the Resistance. My grandfather, who died recently, fought for the Republic and was captured and imprisoned. Two of his uncles were Falangists, so they allowed him back to the family village. The war split the family. He had other uncles on the left.’

I had heard many stories like this, of split families with brothers and cousins pleading for the lives of their relatives on the other side to be spared when the death squads and military tribunals of one side or the other came around.

‘Before he died, my grandfather said that he never regretted fighting for his ideals. His biggest regret, however, was not knowing where his younger brother, who was only nineteen when the war started, was buried,’ explained Enrique, a Republican badge pinned to his chest. ‘All he knew was that he had escaped from a prison work camp in Talavera de la Reina and been killed by the Guardia Civil. He did not dare ask any more than that. My father’s generation was also too scared to find out, so I started looking myself,’ he said. He contacted a historian who had collected the stories of this forgotten group of men and so, eventually, discovered that Tito had died near Candeleda.

Now Tito’s great-nephews and great-nieces, and one nephew, were gathering to give him a proper send-off. Mariano had arranged for a local historian, a maquis specialist, to give them a talk in Candeleda’s town hall. There was standing room only as locals joined the family. Someone placed a republican flag on the dais, thus raising loud complaints from two town councillors who claimed this was an insult to King Juan Carlos. The Spanish monarch’s portrait hung on the wall immediately behind them. The historian’s tale was a sorry one. The guerrilla movement in Gredos had survived for about five years from 1942 onwards. It had killed two people in that time, including a noted Falangist in Candeleda. But it had to devote most of its energies to just keeping itself alive, kidnapping people for money and relying on those in far-flung country spots to feed it – either out of solidarity or of fear. Only a handful of people had been involved. They were finished off by a combination of treason from within their own ranks, Civil Guard infiltrators and the use of pseudo-maquis groups, the contrapartidas, set up by the police to terrorise locals and persuade them that the resistance fighters were really bandoleros, common bandits or outlaws.

Tito and his group had been spotted near El Raso, a small village in the mountains above Candeleda. They had hidden in a cave above a mountain pool but had been cornered by the Civil Guard. Tito and one other were killed. Three of his men were wounded, captured, cured of their wounds, tried and shot. Only one escaped.

The Charco de los Maquis, the mountain pool where Tito died, is a magical Gredos spot. The road here from Candeleda twists up-hill to El Raso, passing orchards of fig trees and, in early June, cherry trees weighed down with fat, red cherries. An unpaved track leads out towards the garganta. The water here is transparent. Fish dart across a mottled background of large, sunken boulders, their size magnified by the still, crystalline water. Boatmen scuttle across the surface. On both banks there are narrow stretches of green pasture and, higher up, olive groves. A blackened, scorched patch on one hill is a reminder of one of Spain’s perennial dramas, the forest fire.

For the last stretch of the road to the charco I gave a lift to Benjamín Ruiz. A miner’s son from the rebellious northern region of Asturias, he had first seen the inside of a police cell in 1934, at the age of fifteen. An Asturian miners’ revolution was put down by Franco on behalf of the elected Conservative government. Some consider this to be the first skirmish of the Civil War. Benjamín would later be Tito’s enlace, his contact for information and food, in El Raso. He was the last person outside his group to see him alive. ‘None of those captured gave me away. If they had ever found out that I was the enlace they would have killed me,’ he said. Now in his eighties, he had recently suffered a mild heart attack and had trouble walking. But his spirits were lifted by the sight of so many young people. ‘Back then there were only a handful of us prepared to do anything against Franco. The young people should know that,’ he said.

The valley is fairly steep here and, right above the pool, a narrow crack in the rock gives way to the cave where Tito had spent his last night. I imagined a handful of desperate men, staring at defeat and wondering whether it was better to fight and die or give up and be executed.

The great-nieces and great-nephews read poetry and threw red carnations on the water. Amongst the revolutionary icons dusted off for the occasion was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. ‘Tomorrow when I die, do not come to me to cry, nor look for me in the ground, I am the wind of freedom,’ someone read. A wreath of flowers in the purple, red and yellow colours of the Republican flag was cast onto the water and left to float downstream. Curiously distant from the proceedings, however, was Tito’s nephew. A man in his sixties, he was Enrique’s father and the closest living relative to the deceased ‘hero’. I sidled up to him. ‘Moving, don’t you think?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Just sad. He had no need to escape from the prison work camp. He didn’t even have a long sentence to serve. They were three brothers. But, because of politics, they never saw one another again after 1936.’

The person closest to Tito, I realised, was the most reluctant to participate in what had clearly become a left-wing homage to him. Later, the nephew would, once more, stand away from the crowd as Mariano – on crutches, having badly singed his legs a few days earlier while using a blow-torch to make a rough, iron plaque to Tito – harangued the gathering. The nephew’s generation had been given the option of being ardent, and privileged, pro-Francoists, downtrodden opponents or simply apolitical. Like many Spaniards of his time, he had chosen the last. He still blamed ‘politics’ for the tragedy of his father and his brothers. Mariano’s words just made him uneasy.

Franco’s regime publicly claimed the maquis were nothing more than a bunch of rural bandoleros. The Spanish parliament belatedly agreed in 2001 that official references to them as bandoleros should be removed. It was something, one of the forty aged survivors who turned up said, that happened ‘twenty years too late’.

Small stories, picked up along the way, gave me some idea of what it had been like to be on the losing side of the war. In Poyales del Hoyo one woman told me that, as a child, a neighbour had tipped a bedpan of faeces and urine over her head in the street ‘for being the daughter of a rojo’. Another starving boy, son of a rojo, was invited by a local right-winger to dip some bread into a steaming cauldron of stew being prepared for a hunting party, only to have his arm thrust deep into the boiling pot as a cruel joke.

In Palacios del Sil, a small village in the hills of León, an eighty-four-year-old woman, Isabel González, told me she was still bitter about the way her father, whose son was shot and left in a roadside mass grave, was continually humiliated by his Falangist neighbours. ‘They would come at any time of the day or night and demand milk from the cow or take whatever they wanted. My father just had to do what they said. It killed him,’ she recalled.

The desire to humiliate, terrorise and exact revenge – already apparent at the Valle de Los Caídos – was summed up by Franco’s chief army psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Vallejo-Nagera. This man, who went on to be Spain’s first university professor of psychology, carried out tests on International Brigade prisoners and Spanish roja women prisoners in Málaga in an attempt to prove that Marxists were genetic retards. His recommendations on what to do with those from the other side included that they should ‘suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all. Some will live in permanent exile, far from the Mother Country which they did not know how to love. Others will lose their freedom, groaning for years in prisons, purging their crimes with forced work in order to earn their daily bread, and will leave their children an infamous legacy: those who betrayed the Patria cannot leave an honourable surname for their children.’

It was an accurate description of what eventually happened. Some 300,000 people were imprisoned after the war. Tens of thousands were put before kangaroo military courts and shot. Many more went into exile. Some would even lose their children along the way. Even in the later years, when the regime’s totalitarian instincts gave way to a form of authoritarian pragmatism, there were usually several hundred political prisoners in jail.

The most shocking recent discovery made by those investigating the excesses of Francoism, made in 2002, has been the treatment meted out to some rojo children. Historian Ricard Vinyes, investigating the fate of women prisoners in Franco’s jails during and immediately after the Civil War in the state archives, came across a so-called ‘red file’. These hold documents covered by a law that protects material on events less than fifty years old in which named people are involved. Curiosity got the better of him. When he opened the file, he discovered, first of all, that the events described in it were more than fifty years old. He read on and so discovered part of the story of what became known as ‘the lost children of Francoism’.

These were children separated from rojo families and then adopted or handed over to Falange or convent-run orphanages. Some 30,000 children passed through their doors between 1944 and 1955. It was a story that, without realising it, Spaniards had been watching on their television screens for a long time. A popular, American-style live television programme, ‘¿Quién Sabe Donde?’ (‘Who Knows Where?’), had spent several years tearfully reuniting split families and runaway children with their parents. A surprisingly large number of cases dated back to the period following the Civil War.

Vinyes helped turn the story of the children into a two-part television documentary. Most of the evidence, barring the Falange papers found by Vinyes on the campaign to return the evacuated children of rojos to Franco’s Spain, was given in the form of personal testimonies. What emerged was not a picture of a centralised, organised system for removing children from their parents, but of a sinister atmosphere in which, in case of doubt, the authorities or the Church naturally ‘assumed’ responsibility for rojo children. Vallejo-Nagera had said that saving the raza, the race, would require the separation of children from their mothers in places ‘away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged’. It was the kind of idea that Franco, who wrote the script of a film called, precisely, Raza, liked.

Two mothers told how their children were taken from them at birth. ‘They took my son to be baptised but they never brought him back. I never saw him again … I suppose they gave him up for adoption. But they never asked me … The angustia, the anguish, will stay with me until I die,’ said Emilia Girón, considered especially dangerous because her brother was in the maquis. Those children evacuated by the Republic to England, France and elsewhere were to be returned, if necessary by force. Vichy France collaborated. The French family of Florencia Calvo tried to hide her, but eventually, at the age of ten, she was shipped back to Spain and sent to an orphanage. ‘I cried because I wanted to be back with my family in France. I wet my bed more than once when I arrived and the nuns made me put the sheets on my head. They made me parade through the dining room with the wet sheets so that I would feel even more shame.’ Florencia did not find her sister, María, for another fifty years.

In Britain, where more than 4,000 children had been evacuated. The local Falange agent suggested bringing back the well-behaved, very catholic Basque children first. This would leave the British to look after the children of anarchists and communists from the Asturian coalmines who were described as ‘wild beasts’. They would thus learn ‘what their parents must be like’.

The documentary was shocking. State television, then controlled by the People’s Party, declined to show it. The regional stations of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalucía – all controlled by opposition parties – did broadcast it. There were record audiences in Catalonia.

Amongst the revelations was evidence that Franco’s ultra-Catholic regime had indulged in the shooting of pregnant women at Torrero prison in Zaragoza province. The evidence came from the prison priest, a Capuchin monk, Gumersindo de Estrella, who tried to persuade a judge to desist. ‘Imagine if I had to wait seven months for each woman who we have to mete out justice to … it is impossible,’ the judge had replied.

One testimony, of a seven-day train trip of women prisoners and their children locked into goods wagons, evoked Primo Levi in its detail of hunger, of people forced to live in their own filth, of cold, disease and the death of small children. One of the worst testimonies came from Teresa Martín, who spent her infant years in a disease-ridden women’s jail in Saturraran, in the Basque Country. ‘The memories are still there. If anyone wants the memory of what happened to continue, all they have to do is ask. I am sixty-two. This is the first time I have talked about it. It is the first time anybody has asked.’

The Catalan broadcaster was inundated by letters. Some correspondents drew perplexed comparisons with Argentina, where the right-wing juntas of the 1970s stole children from prisoners who were secretly killed, the desaparecidos. ‘Why do we know more about what happened in Argentina or Germany during their dictatorships than we know about what happened here for forty years, even though it ended twenty-five years ago?’ asked one viewer. ‘I am a university-educated woman. I cannot understand why, after so many years of study, this has never appeared in a history lesson,’ wrote another.

Many victims found it hard to break their silence. I saw this at first hand, in Poyales, where people sometimes lowered their voices when talking about the Civil War. The historian Vinyes told me he found ex-prisoners he interviewed sometimes asked him to turn off his tape-recorder, or suddenly changed the subject, if their children appeared. Years of enforced silence had taken their toll. ‘They were scared of recounting things that might disturb the family,’ he explained. ‘Fear remains in the blood.’ At an exhibition on the takeover of Barcelona by Franco’s army, sixty years after the event, he found one woman sobbing by a board listing the people shot by firing squads. ‘That man is my father,’ she explained. ‘My mother never told me. She just said he disappeared during the war.’

There is also evidence, however, that the generations that lived through both the Civil War and early, extreme Francoism were genuinely fed up with it and had applied their own, voluntary, silence to it long before Franco died. Already, in the early 1950s, V. S. Pritchett found them ‘politically tired out’. Gerald Brenan, looking for the grave of the poet and playwright García Lorca, would hear a rightist taxi driver say: ‘Between us all we have brought disgrace on Spain. Once it was a happy country; now it is a miserable one, racked from end to end with hatred.’ Jane Duran, a Cuban-born, British-based poet whose father had been a senior Republican officer, devoted an entire book of poems to his silence about the Civil War. That silence, maintained in freedom and exile, had started the day war finished.

In between my visits to the Valley of the Fallen and my other trips looking for Franco, as the comparisons with the Latin American military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s became harder to avoid, I came across a book that had just been published by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. It was called Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. Dorfman, as a prominent intellectual in the Hispanic world and an anti-Pinochet campaigner, is something of a hero in Spain. In Exorcising Terror he asked the following question. ‘Pinochet is a mirror … Are we willing to judge the country that gave origin to him?’ That is a terrifying sort of a question for a country to answer. Had Spain addressed it? Should it have done? Perhaps silence had helped to avoid it.

Some people suggested to me that, indeed, there was a general feeling of shame. Gerald Brenan, during his 1949 journey around Spain, gave more clues. ‘Those who let their fanaticism get the better of them in the Civil War are often obsessed by feelings of guilt, for no hangover is worse than that which follows a civil war and a reign of terror.’ Perhaps, just perhaps, that is what this silence had really been about. Spaniards were ashamed and embarrassed – some for having supported him, others for having failed to overthrow him and others simply because he existed. It was like a family secret, best not talked about, best shoved to the back of the drawer and left there until it could do no more harm.

The shame, if that is the case, is only now lifting. At the end of the third decade without Franco, the dam holding back the gorier details of Francoism has finally burst. One publishing house has set up an entire series that seems dedicated to nothing else. There is still resistance, however. The People’s Party went as far as it would in recognising the Francoist right’s historic guilt in the same parliamentary motion in which it permitted local councils to spend money digging up Civil War graves. The motion recognised the existence of victims of ‘the repression of the Francoist dictatorship’ and denounced ‘the violent imposition of ideologies’. But the People’s Party – which speaks for more than a third of Spanish voters – has so far refused to go any further. It was the only one of eleven parties in Las Cortes, the Madrid parliament, to boycott a parliamentary homage to Franco’s victims in 2003. Its habitual claim is that the left is indulging in ‘mothball politics’ whenever it brings the issue up.

The details of what happened come, anyway, too late for most of the victims – who are dead. But studying, in any rigorous detail, what actually happened remains a Herculean task. A disturbing number of archives, be they military, prison, police or Church, are an impenetrable mess, with some left rotting, unclassified, in warehouses dotted around the country. Like the statues, they have been shoved to the back of the cupboard by ministries or government departments. In some archives, especially those run by the Church, investigators are not allowed to dig randomly but must say precisely what they are looking for – a question many of them, following vague clues, are unable to answer. Others, such as those of the Francisco Franco Foundation, a drab Madrid apartment that holds many of his papers and receives state funding, have proven almost impossible for non-friendly historians to access.

How, I wondered as I went seeking the Generalísimo, would a young Spaniard, a child of today, first encounter the man who dominated his country’s history in the previous century? An answer to that came from an unexpected source. When he was six, my eldest son came back from his Madrid primary school singing the following ditty to the tune of the Spanish national anthem: ‘Franco, Franco que tiene el culo blanco, porque su mujer lo lava con Ariel’ (‘Franco, Franco, his arse is very white, and that is because his wife washes it with Ariel’). Children have a special knack for taking the sting out of scary, authority figures by lampooning them. Generations of schoolchildren, I am told, have learnt the same song. Part of the joke, today, is that Spain has one of the few national anthems in the world with no words to it. The old Francoist words were purged after his death, and nothing replaced them.

The fact that he knew the ditty did not mean my son knew who Franco was. We had to explain that to him. It was a rare sighting, though, of Franco in modern Spain. For a moment he had escaped from the storeroom or from the inside of a history book. He had lived on in the playground, a buffoon-like, but still threatening, figure. It was a sign, however, of the old Caudillo’s potency that he should survive here as a modern bogeyman, as unrealistic to the children singing about him as Guy Fawkes is to British children.

LaTransición – as Spaniards called their transition to democracy – had returned to Spain its pre-Francoist wordless national anthem. It had also laid down, it seemed, many of the unwritten rules of silence that were now being broken. Spaniards, and foreigners who observed this transition, had generally described it in glowing terms. It certainly achieved its overall aim of converting Spain to democracy. I was beginning to wonder, however, whether it was quite as perfect as it had been described. The Transición, clearly, was the key to many of the things I was coming across. If I wanted to understand it all, I would have to move on and find out some more about one of the most exciting – and unique – moments in Spanish history.