In fact, after the war the new regime contemplated moving the Spanish capital to a more ‘deserving’ city like Valladolid, Burgos or Salamanca, cities where the Nationalists had always been welcomed and where they had not even had to fight. Ramón Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, a Nazi sympathiser and simultaneously foreign and interior minister, insisted on the need to construct a ‘new Madrid, more fitting for an historic Spain’.
