Overview
- Heirs of Francisco Franco loaded roughly 400 movable objects onto trucks bound for Madrid on Friday, removing lamps, sculptures, weapons, ceramics and a chapel model that had hung in the Pazo de Meirás.
- The Government withdrew judicial claims on those items because it said it could not prove public ownership, while courts have already recognized a large corpus of other works, furniture and documents as state property.
- An auction house in Madrid has been commissioned to inventory and value at least part of the removed pieces with sales expected to begin in September.
- Public visits to the Pazo were suspended during the packing and removals and memorialist groups denounced the operation as 'another expolio', accusing authorities of passivity and demanding greater transparency.
- The dispute highlights gaps in heritage protection at the Pazo — declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 2021 — and could prompt calls for stronger inventories, clearer provenance rules and tighter controls on moving contested cultural goods.