Spanish views from a small town

The battle over the Pazo de Meirás, in Sada, A Coruña, continues. This manor house was built by the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán. After her death, her family was tricked into selling it to a religious order, that turned around and "gave" it to General Franco, as a "present" from the local people. To fix it up, a mandatory subscription was set up, to which  everyone in the province of A Coruña had to forcibly contribute. Now, seventy years later, a judge has mandated that it was illegally given to Franco, and that it now belongs to the State as a historical site. The Francos were ordered to hand over the keys by either last week, or this week. Since they tried to fill trucks with the contents, the judge ordered them to return anything they had taken out of the manor house, because the sentence referred not only to the real estate, but also to the contents. Looking over things, it was discovered that Franco had pilfered important items from other palaces, and even the Ro...

We continue with the exaltation and veneration of a figure in our country's history we would do well to put in his actual place, as a loathsome parentheses that held off the dragging of Spain into the modern world. Franco should be understood as a power hungry thief spawned by a civil war. Instead, his descendants were allowed to keep their ill-begotten riches, and are still mentioned with reverence, such as when his only daughter, Carmen Franco y Polo, died at the end of last year. Her passing should not have been news, simply a note in encyclopedias.  Her passing means her children are now settling the, lengthy, inheritance. Among some of the riches is the Pazo de Meirás, in Sada. I wrote about how Franco really stole it from the original owner's daughters, Emilia Pardo Bazán, for their intention had been to donate it to a Jesuit community, in  In Perpetuity . Now, Franco's grandchildren apparently want to put the property up for sale, rather than give it back to the co...

Google is telling me today that it's the 166th anniversary of the birth of Emilia Pardo Bazán, a feminist writer born in A Coruña, and who was highly criticized during her lifetime for writing about working women and defending the education of women. She was a prolific writer, essayist, and speaker, and her most famous novel is Los Pazos de Ulloa , a novel about the decadence and rot at the heart of the traditional land-holding Galician aristocracy. I don't think she would have like Franco very much if she had lived to see the Civil War. He represented the pretentious land-holder she criticized in her novels.  Emilia inherited the remains of a castle, or pazo , that had been almost entirely destroyed by Napoleon's troops. She remodelled the castle, and built upon the ruins. The origins of the Pazo de Meirás are therefore sixteenth century, with rebuilding in the late nineteenth, and major work added in the late 1930's. Still, in pictures it has the aspect of a mediev...