2023-05-05 23:53:49
The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, narrated yesterday his sleeplessness after spending a night in El Pardo, where heads of state who visit Spain usually reside without anyone having attested to a similar experience. The Colombian spoke of recurring “nightmares” for having slept in what was the residence of the dictator Francisco Franco. “He filled my head with nightmares,” he confessed during the informative breakfast organized this Friday by New Economy Forum.
In its centuries of standing, the palace has witnessed horrors and joys, anecdotes and silences, deaths and births, dreams and nightmares… And, to tell the truth, Petro is not the first person Franco tormented after his death in the vicinity. He counts david lefty y Angel Gutierrez in his work ‘The secret life of Franco the hidden face of the dictator’ (EDAF, 2005) that after the dictator died “he appeared to a soldier who was guarding the wall, which surrounds the palace like a weak wall, in the so-called ‘Gate of Death’. The caudillo appeared to him on horseback and asked him for news. The soldier, poor thing, under the effects of the fear of his life, reacted by snapping to attention and giving the news that was requested of him with a broken voice: ‘No news’».
Franco died on November 20, 1975 at the Hospital de la Paz in Madrid, but suffered a slow agony, with no less than four heart attacks, with El Pardo as a silent witness to his suffering. While there, on November 3, 1975, Franco fell into a coma due to a gastrointestinal hemorrhage, whose attempt to stop him with special balls it failed and forced the emergency patient to intervene in the regiment’s first-aid kit. After leaving a trail of blood throughout the palace (it is said that he was transferred rolled up in a carpet), the doctors finally managed to tie off the broken artery in an operation that lasted several hours, where the light in the makeshift operating room failed and it was necessary to light the womb of the dictator with lanterns. A real nightmare for the patient and the health workers who treated him.
Between myth and reality, local legends They have been talking ever since about “the little light of El Pardo”, a light bulb in his office in the palace that still goes on and off today as a reminder of the many hours worked by the man who was dictator of Spain for forty years. In addition, another paranormal legend referred to by Zurdo and Gutiérrez in their work speaks of a recurring ‘curve girl’ in its vicinity, a non-negotiable element in Spanish geography, and even of an unidentified object in its fields. “It was also said that a UFO had been seen in the highest area of the mountain. Due to the falling and flaccid figure reported by the witnesses, it must have looked like a large luminous condom more than a flying saucer”, these authors explain humorously.
Franco’s relics
The Royal Site of El Pardo was the place chosen by Francisco Franco as his residence after the civil War. Among the reasons for choosing this place and no other were its proximity to Madrid (ten kilometers from the Moncloa neighborhood), the presence of exceptional hunting grounds (a local legend says that its name comes from when Felipe II asked to hunt ‘a brown bear’ headed straight towards this town) and the sober elegance of his palace, used by different monarchs as a hunting lodge and place of leisure.
Death of Alfonso XII in El Pardo.
It was never a huge or main palace for the Habsburg or Bourbon Kings, but during the life of the most hunting monarchs, such as Felipe II, Felipe V or Carlos III, it was very crowded. And it is that for most of the members of the royal family and travelers the palace was always inhospitable and lonely, in the middle of the forest and without gardens, where you could hardly do anything other than hunt. However, during the reign of Alfonso XII the most tragic events of the reign occurred there. There the King spent his honeymoon with his first wife, Queen María de las Mercedes, who died a few months later, and he himself breathed his last breath at only 27 years of age within his walls.
Franco, in the rehabilitation of the halls and rooms of the palace, took special interest in converting that bedroom where Alfonso XII died into a chapel, as well as incorporating a movie theater to satiate his hobbies and a large work room to act as a headquarters of the Council of Ministers. The palace was always decorated with luxurious clocks, tapestries and furniture, but when it came to the rooms of Franco and his wife, Carmen Polo, only austerity was breathed. The bedroom was made up of two beds pushed together with two simple bedside tables and various wall furniture, including the prie-dieu with the relic of the incorrupt arm of Saint Teresa. Other religious objects that he jealously kept close to his person in El Pardo were the right forearm of San Francisco Javier or the mantle of the Virgen del Pilar, which wrapped him in his final agony.
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