Franco’s long arm

If by chance you go to London, as a good tourist you will be obliged to go to Trafalgar Square, even if there are no more birdseed stands for pigeons, because with good judgment it is forbidden to feed them, because they are a plague of antediluvian beings that, in reality, are flying rats.

This square is located in Westminster, in the very heart of London, and can be easily reached by tube, alighting at Charing Cross station. The National Gallery is located there, in case you are a museum lover, and the Anglican parish of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, which comes to be San Martín de los Prados, like San Julián de los Prados, from Oviedo, but with less grass, because that English church does not have a blade, although it has a famous choir, who sings beautifully, in case you like music. Do not think that it is all piousness in that church, because in the crypt there is a winch, in which they do jazz sessions at night.

The curious thing about this square is its name from Trafalgar, which is a cape that is in Barbate, very close to Cádiz. Naturally it is immediately understood that it is observed that in the center of the square there is a tall column surmounted by the statue of Admiral Nelson. This commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar, which was the last victory of that admiral against the French and Spanish fleets, after the alliance of Napoleon and Carlos IV. There the Spanish sailors Churruca and Alcalá Galiano died, and Gravina was badly wounded, who died after those wounds. That was the year 1805, before the War of Independence.

In Palma de Mallorca there are streets with the names of those illustrious and heroic Spanish sailors from the Battle of Trafalgar. But the mayor of that town tried to remove those names from the street because, in his opinion, they had Francoist connotations. In other words, they were already Francoists a century before Franco was born in Ferrol. In the package of Francoists to remove his street, there was also Admiral Cervera, who was another illustrious sailor from the battle of Cuba against the United States in 1898, although this with a little more reason because Franco was already born and was six years old.

After the gush of criticism that rained down on the mayor of Palma, he saw fit to paralyze the change in the name of the streets, appointing a commission of experts to illustrate the matter. It does not seem that any commission was necessary for something that anyone who has studied history of Spain should know, but welcome is the rectification of that man, who publicly boasted of so much ignorance. I could have asked some English tourists on their island before, that they surely know Trafalgar Square and why it is called that.

The mayor of Palma has not been the only one who has seen the long arm of Franco in any character in our national history, because a few years ago they also removed his name from a street in Barcelona to Admiral Cervera, who fought in the Philippines and against the Yankees, and that he was Minister of the Navy while President of the Government Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, of the Progressive Party, and later a senator.

More fun is the story of the change of names to some streets of Avilés, such as the crossings that go from Rivero to Llano Ponte. There were the streets of General Mola and General Lucuce. The first of them was indeed Francoist, because he was the one that rose up in Seville in 1936. But Don Pedro Lucuce y Ponte was a general from Avilés who was born almost three centuries before, he was a military engineer and director of the Royal Mathematical Society. . The streets were withdrawn from both of them, shortly after the arrival of democracy, by Franco supporters, which Franco had already extended his arm for centuries. Things of ignorance.

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