The Franco Era

The Franco Era figures in the account not only as a period of political rule but as the origin of a local dispute over who could claim a community’s heritage. An unnamed minister took a Romanesque chapel for his estate in Galicia, and its eventual recovery became a test of whether the village’s past could be reclaimed after the regime had ended.

The chapel removed for an abandoned project

In the 1950s, plans for a reservoir threatened to cover three villages. The dead were transferred from their cemeteries, and two churches were dismantled stone by stone so they could be moved. A small chapel was also meant to be relocated. The reservoir was never built, and the churches were returned to their original sites; the chapel was the exception. Rather than simply remaining lost, it had been taken by a minister of Franco, who had become attached to the Romanesque building and installed it at his estate in Galicia.

An inheritance carried into the democratic period

After the transition to democracy, demands began for the chapel’s return. Yet the village to which it belonged had no remaining residents: people had either died or emigrated. The absence of a local population helped leave the claim without sustained political support, while the minister’s heirs resisted returning the building. Ambiguous laws neither clearly protected the claimants nor condemned the heirs’ position. The chapel’s continued displacement thus outlasted the regime itself, turning political change into a slow, unresolved question of restitution.

Irene’s campaign and the politics of memory

When Irene became mayor, she made the chapel’s return a priority and persisted until it was secured, finding a new location acceptable to the community. Her recovery effort was her first major success as mayor. A journalist named Anselmo attacked the campaign in El Diario Montañés, portraying the return as a left-wing effort to provoke respectable people and objecting to the chapel being taken from Francoist heirs. The hostile article, which Irene kept framed, records how the struggle over the building was also a struggle over how the past should be publicly remembered.

Heritage beyond ideology

Irene was an atheist, a fact that made her attachment to the chapel appear paradoxical to some. She explained the campaign through civic responsibility: the chapel was the village’s heritage, she had promised to govern for all its residents, and they wanted it back. In this telling, the chapel’s significance does not depend on religious belief. Its removal by a powerful individual, its decades away from its community, and its eventual return make it a material reminder of how the Franco Era’s acts of appropriation could persist as local disputes long after the political circumstances that enabled them had changed.