Pioneering activists risked arrest and imprisonment amid lingering persecution after Franco dictatorship

New research has shed light on Spain’s first transgender political organisation, a trailblazing collective that was launched in 1978 as its members grappled with the lingering persecution of the country’s four-decade dictatorship.

Founded in Barcelona, the Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales, or Collective of Transvestis and Transexuals, sought to add its voice to the heated conversation playing out across Spain in the transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

2026 marks the 90th anniversary of the Francoist uprising and the beginning of the Spanish civil war. An estimated 120,000-150,000 people disappeared during Franco’s repression, their remains scattered across 2,567 mass graves. The far right’s entry into regional governments, as in Extremadura, is dismantling the historical memory laws that allow for reparations for victims of the disappearances. The photojournalist Roberto Palomo researched the life of his great-grandfather, the recovery of his remains and the effects of traumatic memory on the descendants

They took everything from my great-grandfather Silvestre Indias Carvajal and left us with nothing but his story, which was buried at the bottom of a 30-metre-deep well in south-west Spain for 87 years.

Silvestre worked as a municipal clerk in his small home town of Feria in Extremadura. He was given the job in recognition for his service in the war in Morocco, a conflict to which he was dispatched by lottery.

Feria is a small town in the south-eastern Spanish region of Extremadura, which sits atop a mountain range. It had barely 4,000 inhabitants in 1936 when it was occupied by Gen Franco’s rebel troops. The subsequent repression was swift and merciless and anyone deemed an enemy of the coup was eliminated. The estimated death toll in Feria is 97, making it one of the hardest-hit towns in the region.

These unsettling and unusual places tell a vivid story about the unique way that Spain deals with its past – or fails to

Una Grande Libre reads the sign above the entrance to a bar-restaurant in Madrid’s Usera neighbourhood. This was Francisco Franco’s motto for Spain – one, great, free – and it is accompanied by a large portrait of the dictator superimposed on to the window.

The exteriors of El Cangrejo in Ciudad Real and Casa Pepe in Despeñaperros are a little bit more subtle, but not much: decorated ostentatiously in the red and yellow of the Spanish flag. The accompanying historical symbols on display, such as the yoke and arrows of the Falange and the Eagle of San Juan, remove any doubt: the year is 2026 and you have encountered one of Spain’s network of bars and restaurants that proudly glorify Franco and his dictatorship.

Military officer who led an armed assault on the Spanish parliament in an attempted coup in 1981

Lt Col Antonio Tejero, who has died aged 93, terrorised much of Spain on 23 February 1981 when he led an armed assault on the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, in Madrid.

At 6.23pm, some 250 civil guards burst into the semi-circular chamber of the lower house during the investiture of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as the new prime minister. For 18 hours the entire parliament was held hostage until a negotiated surrender the following morning; the Communist party leader Santiago Carrillo said he had expected to be shot.

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.