THE Supreme Court has ordered the relatives of the dictator General Francisco Franco to hand over his Galicia summer residence to the State.
The ruling from Spain’s highest court ends an eight-year legal battle over the future of Pazo de Meiras in A Coruña.
Franco’s heirs put up the property for sale for €8 million in 2018 with the government stepping in to take it over.
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The Supreme Court dismissed all appeals against lower court rulings that the building would be returned to the State.
The Pazo de Meiras was built by the writer Emilia Pardo Bazan between 1893 and 1907.
It was bought by public subscription and handed to Franco as a ‘gift’ from the people of A Coruña.
The Justice Ministry said that locals had been forced to contribute to the public subscription, and that Franco’s eventually purchase of the manor in 1941 was fraudulent.
A Galicia judge in 2020 ruled that that Franco’s purchase was invalid and had been a ‘fiction carried out with the sole intention of putting the property in his name’.
The leaders of A Coruña’s council and business community essentially obliged local people to hand over a portion of their income and wealth to purchase the property, expand its grounds and furnish the palace to the standards that the dictator wanted.
“There was nothing voluntary about the donations,” says Carlos Babio, co-author of a historical study of the building.
“Money was taken from workers’ wages, and we’re talking about practically the entire population of A Coruña in 1938,” he said.
After Franco’s death in 1975, his family continued to use the property.
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