After a two-year battle with the government, heirs of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco have been ordered to open his flamboyant summer estate to the public.
The regional government of Galicia this week declared the late 19th-century property in the town of Sada a cultural heritage site. As such, El Pazo de Meiras must open its doors to the public four days a month. Franco’s heirs have asked the government to cover the cost of security on those days.
The move is the most recent step in Spain’s belated quest to come to terms with the legacy of its civil war and the Franco dictatorship. The last triumphant equestrian statute of the dictator was removed from public view last month — more than 30 years after his death.
Street signs honoring Franco and his generals have also recently been withdrawn from many towns, and volunteers have dug up the remains of his victims buried in mass graves.
The neomedieval estate was officially given as an “offering” by the city of La Coruna to the Generalissimo — “founder of the new empire,” according to the effusive gift-giving decree — amid the nationalistic furor of the civil war. But the money to pay for this gift came from taxpayers and forced donations by residents of the La Coruna region, where Franco was born.
“In reality, it was plunder dressed up as a purchase,” wrote Manuel Rivas, a Galician writer, in El Pais, adding that the palatial token was a “trophy of triumph.”
The fortress-like property and its surrounding gardens and forests was bought in 1938 from a writer, Emilia Pardo Bazan, for between 400,000 and 750,000 pesetas (US$334,000 and US$626,000), ABC newspaper reported. The generalissimo used it as a summer getaway during his 40-year dictatorship.
“I accept this gift with pleasure exclusively because it is a donation from my beloved countrymen,” Franco is quoted to have said on taking possession.
The Commission to Recover Historic Memory of La Coruna plans to offer guided tours describing the forced donations and other pressures that put El Pazo de Meiras into Franco’s hands.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS