page_title: Valle de los Caídos
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Valle de los Caídos / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: Español: Cuelgamuros, también conocido como El Valle de los Caídos o la Abadía de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos
context_page_description: The Valle de los Caídos is a Catholic basilica and a monumental memorial in the municipality of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, erected at Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. Dictator Francisco Franco claimed that the monument was meant to be a "national act of atonement" and reconciliation. It served as the burial place of Franco's remains from his death in November 1975 until his exhumation on 24 October 2019, as a result of efforts to remove all public veneration of his dictatorship, and following a long legal process.
  The monument, considered a landmark of 20th-century Spanish architecture, was designed by Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez on a scale to equal, according to Franco, "the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and memory." Together with the Universidad Laboral de Gijón, it is the most prominent example of the original Spanish Neo-Herrerian style, which was intended to form part of a revival of Juan de Herrera's architecture, exemplified by the nearby royal residence El Escorial.
context_section_description: The Valle de los Caídos appears in Richard Morgan's 2002 novel Altered Carbon, where it is being used as a base of operations for one of the major antagonists, Reileen Kawahara.
  It also appears in the 2010 Spanish comedy terror film The Last Circus (Spanish: Balada triste de trompeta). Graham Greene's 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote uses a visit to the Valle to illustrate the competing political and social attitudes to Franco's reign and the status of his tomb in modern Spain.
  There is also a large reference to this monument and the labourers who built it in Victoria Hislop's book The Return.
  In 2013, Spain saw the release of the film All'Ombra Della Croce (A la Sombra de la Cruz) directed by the Italian filmmaker Alessandro Pugno. The film tells the secret story of the children of the chorus who sing every day in the mass. They live in a boarding school inside the monument and receive an education that tries to resist the drift towards secularism and scientism of contemporary Spain and of global society. The film has been awarded with the first prize for the best documentary at Festival de Málaga de Cine Español.
  In the 2016 film The Queen of Spain, actor Antonio Resines plays Blas Fontiverosa, a film director who returns to Spain after fleeing following the Civil War and is captured and forced to work on the construction of the Valley.
  In 2016, Mayor of Madrid Manuela Carmena, proposed to change the site's name from "El Valle de los Caídos" to "El Valle de la Paz" (The Valley of Peace).
  The monument appears in Dan Brown's novel Origin.
caption: General view of the monument.
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