Spain exhumes remains of fascist party founder Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera

Experts were on Monday exhuming the remains of the founder of Spain's fascist Falange party from a grandiose basilica, where the body of former dictator Francisco Franco once lay, ahead of their removal to a low-key family grave.

The operation comes six months after Spain passed the so-called democratic memory law which is designed to tackle the legacy of the 1936-39 civil war and the decades of dictatorship that followed.

Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera founded the Falange party in 1933, which became one of the pillars of Francisco Franco's brutal regime, along with the military and Spain's Roman Catholic Church.

Executed in November 1936 at the start of the war for conspiring against the elected Republican government, Primo de Rivera was in 1959 buried inside the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Madrid.

Under the new law, no figure linked to the 1936 military coup that triggered the civil war should be buried in "a prominent public place" that could encourage acts of homage or exultation.

Accordingly, the family agreed to have his remains be transferred to San Isidro, selecting April 24 as the date because it marks exactly 120 years since his birth.

The basilica where Primo de Rivera's remains lay for over six decades, is part of a vast hillside mausoleum built after the civil war by Franco's regime -- in part by the forced labour of 20,000 political prisoners.

When the dictator died in 1975, he was also buried there, in a tomb by the altar, close to Primo de Rivera's grave, with the site long being a draw for those nostalgic for the Franco era.

Cabinet minister Felix Bolanos said the operation "was another step" in the government's efforts to strip the mausoleum of its status as a symbol of Francoism and far-right ideology.

"It should not be possible to pay tribute to any person evoking the dictatorship," he said after the government announced the exhumation on Thursday.

Honouring those who died or suffered violence or repression during the civil war and dictatorship has been a top priority for the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who came to power in 2018.

In 2019, his government relocated Franco's remains from the basilica following a lengthy legal battle with the dictator's family.