EL ESCORIAL, Spain, March 29 (UPI) -- Some want to make Francisco Franco's mausoleum at the Valley of the Fallen in Spain into a memorial to his victims.
"Our aim is to convert the mausoleum into a study center of Francoism to explain to people the meaning of the dictatorship and its horrors," said Jaume Bosch, a senator in Spain's upper house and vice president of Catalunya's Left-Green Initiative, part of the region's Socialist coalition.
"It's the perfect site to be converted into a study and education center, we must explain why and how the Valley of the Fallen was constructed in the style of great Nazi monuments," Bosch said.
Bosch said Prime Minster's Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government confirmed it planned to submit a proposal to change the orientation of the monument in June, the Independent reported Tuesday.
Defeated Republican prisoners who escaped execution during the Spanish Civil War were put into forced labor after 1939.
Completed in 1959, the Valley of the Fallen consists of a 500-foot high cross and a cathedral carved out of the mountain beneath below.
