John Hopkins

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It is the 24th of October 2019, in the mountains of central Spain.

Late autumn sunlight shines down weakly on the Valley of the Fallen, a memorial to the Spanish Civil War perched high on a rocky crag.

A monumental cross casts an elongated shadow over the white-walled buildings that make up the complex.

In the cavernous interior of the crypt, hewn into the granite of the mountain itself, a tomb has been opened.

Workmen strain to lift out an ornate coffin, as a group of black-clad mourners look on.

Among them is a woman, her soft sobs echoing off the soaring stone walls, a descendant of the 20th century dictator General Francisco Franco.

She is here because the Spanish government has ordered the removal of his body from this memorial, which was built using the forced labour of his victims.

Once the workmen have finished, several male relatives hoist the flag-draped coffin onto their shoulders and slowly carry it outside.

The woman follows close behind, her high heels tapping on the polished marble floor.

She emerges, blinking into the courtyard outside, where a smart white helicopter waits to receive the coffin.

With the cargo loaded, the rotors start to turn.

Shading her eyes with one gloved hand, the woman watches as it rises into the pale blue sky, bearing Franco to his new resting place.

Meanwhile, in the northern Spanish province of Catalonia, an archaeologist kneels in a grave of a very different type.

A team of volunteers have dug this large rectangular pit in the orange earth.

Now he bends over with a brush clutched tightly in one calloused hand, carefully scraping dirt away from what is slowly revealing itself to be a skull.

One of his students hunkers down next to him and continues the painstaking work of clearing earth away from the ribcage of the skeleton.

Gradually she brings the individual bones of the spinal column into view.

A line of white plastic buttons is uncovered, and further down, the dull shine of what appears to be a belt buckle.

The archaeologist returns to his own task, finally clearing enough earth away that the entire skull is visible.