Almost 72 years to the day after Nationalist troops swept into Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the city's last monument to General Francisco Franco and his dictatorship has finally been taken down.
The removal of the four-metre-high bronze "Victory" statue – situated in the central Avenida Diagonal, the boulevard down which Franco's forces advanced on 26 January, 1939 – was watched by a small crowd of about 200.
Thanks to the law of Historic Memory passed in 2007 by Spain's socialist government, monuments of all kinds to the general who ruled Spain for nearly 40 years, from statues to street names, are gradually being removed.
In fiercely nationalist Catalonia, where Franco outlawed the region's language and abolished local government, the town halls have been singularly thorough at weeding them out. And in a city like Barcelona, famous for its hard-headed entrepreneurs, only the risk of traffic jams for shoppers rushing to January sales provided a last-minute delay on the statue's removal.
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