The spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Assembly, Manuela Bergerot, has asked the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to remove the Cuelgamuros Valley – formerly known as Valley of the Fallen – from the tourist routes of the regional Executive.
On the website of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports the ‘Imperial Route’ appears and within it one of the “visit points” is this place. “Although it does not have a prominent burial place, the Valley of the Fallen still, to this day, remains the largest mass grave in this country and it certainly cannot be one of the main tourist spots in the region without at least least contemplate a whole approach to memory, informing the visitor what happened there, under what conditions it was built and who is still buried,” added Bergerot, in an interview with Europa Press.
Cuelgamuros appears on itinerary 5 of the UNESCO World Heritage Routes, within the section dedicated to San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This is the description on the tourismmadrid.es portal:
Bergerot understands that the work of the Secretary of State for Memory should continue during the last legislature, which seeks to place this space “in line with other memory centers in the rest of Europe.” To this end, he has asked that pedagogical tools be given that can teach new generations “under what conditions it was built.”
The first thing should be to “continue with the exhumations of all the people, the 33,000 victims who are buried in Cuelgamuros against their relatives.” “Today we all know international examples, both in Europe and in Argentina, as in Chile, of memory centers that honor the memory of the victims of dictatorships and also help us learn about that part of history,” continued Bergerot, specialist in democratic memory.
