Franco's Crypt

History is written by the victors. It's a cliché, but a reliable one - except in the case of the Spanish Civil War. Many believe - wrongly, as it turns out - that under Franco's dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or created. And this myth reinforces another: that there is a national pact to forget what really happened.

In the four decades since Franco's death foreign narratives - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Casablanca, Homage to Catalonia - still have greater credibility than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to reclaim this crucial aspect of its history. In a compelling investigation of collective memory Jeremy Treglown talks to the descendants of men and women killed during the civil war and ensuing dictatorship and stands on a hillside with them as remains are excavated; he attends a Sunday service in the basilica dedicated to Franco's memory, examines monuments, paint.