Franco's body should be removed from Valley of the Fallen, says bill

Spain's main opposition party has presented a bill calling for the body of General Francisco Franco to be exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have become a rallying point for the country's far right.

The bill, put forward by Odón Elorza, a former Socialist party mayor of San Sebastián, calls for the bones to be returned to the dictator's family, or re-buried in a "more appropriate" location.

Most of the symbols of the Franco era have been removed from Spain's streets and squares, but his body remains in the biggest Francoist monument of all, a 260-metre-long underground basilica topped by a 150-metre-high cross, 30 miles north of Madrid.

The monument was built at his behest with the help of forced labour of the republican side of the civil war. Franco was buried in the basilica after his death in 1975 alongside the leader of the far-right Falangist party, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Franco had previously ordered that 40,000 corpses of victims of the civil war be buried in the crypts and tunnels around the basilica.

The bill calls for the Valley of the Fallen to be redesignated as "a place for the culture of reconciliation, of the collective democratic memory … that recognises all of the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship". It describes Franco as "the maximum exponent of a totalitarian regime" and the "enemy of democracy". It also calls for Primo de Rivera's tomb to be moved as well.

The bill will now have to be voted on by a parliamentary commission, where it is likely to face opposition from the governing rightwing People's party.