Cuelgamuros / Valley of the Fallen is a place where private attachment and political imprisonment intersect. In the novel, a woman makes a home near the construction site by means of a false family document, so that she can remain close to a political prisoner; the place also enters a conversation about love, class, and the limits imposed by the world into which people are born.

Setting and Political Context

Cuelgamuros is associated with the works of the Valley of the Fallen, where political prisoners served their sentences through labor. Its presence in the story is not merely geographical: access to a life beside a prisoner depends on a fabricated family status, making the site part of a system in which intimacy is shaped by imprisonment and surveillance.

The place also recurs against the broader history of political exile and repression. In the account of the Argentine dictatorship beginning on 24 March 1976, the Spanish Republic’s exiles—having built new lives overseas after 1939—are described as facing another exile, this time returning home as foreigners and empty-handed. Cuelgamuros belongs to the novel’s Spanish landscape of political consequences that outlast individual wars and migrations.

Manolita Perales and Silverio Aguado

Manolita Perales, a close friend of Rita’s, lives in Cuelgamuros despite never having married. A false family book identifies her as the legitimate wife of Silverio Aguado, a political prisoner serving his sentence in the Valley’s construction works. The document gives her a way to live near him, turning a bureaucratic fiction into the practical condition of their relationship.

Manolita’s circumstances become part of the narrator’s account of love and political commitment. She had risked living in an isolated mountain house without water, electricity, or much furniture in order to see Silverio every day, and was content there. Her choice stands against the narrator’s description of Rita’s difficulty in forming a relationship with a Communist: Manolita has accepted hardship to remain beside a imprisoned comrade, while Rita reflects on how inherited class and family worlds persist even when they conflict with political beliefs.

A Contrast Between Women and Their Worlds

During a summer without holidays, the narrator and Rita go up to the mountains on some Sundays to eat with Manolita. The visits place the improvised household near Cuelgamuros within a social circle that includes Rita’s aunt María Luisa. Manolita recalls that María Luisa seemed older at first, then younger than Caridad; the narrator sees the two women as nearly opposite models of womanhood.

That contrast gives the setting a wider social meaning. The narrator understands his future mother-in-law as a tenacious survivor of a Spain that was republican, bourgeois, cultivated, and left-wing, while he sees María Luisa as a product of Franco’s victory and of the established Salamanca neighborhood. Cuelgamuros, with Manolita’s precarious domestic life beside the prisoner’s forced labor, is one of the concrete settings through which the novel registers the unequal and lasting consequences of political defeat.