Thousands of girls were locked up by Board for the Protection of Women for ‘rehabilitation’

Spain is to formally pardon a group of 53 women who are among thousands who were incarcerated by the Franco regime on the grounds that they were supposedly “fallen or in danger of falling”.

The women were locked up as adolescents by the Board for the Protection of Women, a collection of institutions run by religious orders. The board, which had echoes of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries, was overseen by Carmen Polo, the wife of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco.

Little is taught about the murderous, incompetent dictatorship – and now almost one in five young people say Franco was good for the country

At first sight, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky voiced army officer with a shaky grasp on non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco’s ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Giles Tremlett is the author of El Generalisimo and Ghosts of Spain

Events to mark the 50th anniversary of dictator’s death are intended to remind Spaniards, particularly the young, of the dangers of fascism

Mingorrubio municipal cemetery, which sits where the suburbs of north-west Madrid fade out into the countryside, must have been something of a comedown for a man who was originally laid to rest with a 150-metre-high cross for a headstone and four enormous bronze archangels to watch over him.

But six years after his remains were disinterred from the grotesque splendour of the Valley of the Fallen and flown by helicopter to Mingorrubio for reburial, Francisco Franco is at least in good company.

This week marks 50 years of Spanish democracy, but the failure to talk more about the crimes of the dictatorship leaves us vulnerable

Like most Spaniards alive today, I was born after the death of Franco 50 years ago. Even for my parents’ generation, the dictatorship that lasted from 1939 until 20 November 1975 is today a distant bad dream. Growing up, the stories I heard were mostly about the post-Franco democratic transition, a time full of promise and energy as younger people set about rebuilding everything from scratch.

My mother, who was pregnant with me when she voted in the first free elections in 1977, talks about that time as the happiest of her life. International media reporting from that year described “a broad optimism” in a soon-to-be “healthy, modern, lively nation”.

María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain

Zehntausende junge Frauen wurden während der Franco-Diktatur in Besserungsanstalten von Nonnen gequält, weil sie als rebellisch galten. Auch Paca Blanco erlebte jahrelange Folter. 50 Jahre nach dem Tod des Diktators fordert sie, dass die spanische Kirche diese Geschichte endlich aufarbeitet.