A judge in Spain on Thursday ordered the first-ever exhumation of victims of the nation`s 1936-39 civil war from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast memorial where dictator Francisco Franco is also buried.

The ruling by judge Baltazar Garzon of the National Audience involves the bodies of eight Republicans -- seven men and one woman -- shot dead on August 20, 1936 by Nationalist forces.

The eight were buried there without the consent of their families, according to top-selling daily newspaper El Pais.

`We are going to recover the remains of my father, my uncle and six others ... I am very happy,` 74-year-old Fausto Canales told El Pais.

Historians estimate the mass graves at the Valley of the Fallen, some 60 kilometres (80 miles) from Madrid, contain the remains of between 40,000 and 60,000 Republicans and Franco supporters.

Both Franco, who died in 1975, and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange party that provided the ideological basis for his regime and was executed by Republicans in 1936, are buried at the site, whose giant granite cross is visible for kilometres (miles) around.

Some 15,000 prisoners from the losing left-wing Republican side of Spain`s civil war were made to work between 1940 and 1958 on the underground mausoleum, often under harsh and dangerous condions.

Garzon also ordered the opening of four more mass graves as part of a probe which he launched last month into the disappearances of some 114,266 people during the war and the early years of Franco`s rule.

Last month he already ordered the opening of 19 mass graves, including one in southern Spain near Granada where Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca is thought to be buried along with three other men.

While Franco`s regime honoured its own dead, it left up to 30,000 of its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country, according to victims` rights associations.

Garzon, famous for his pursuit of Basque terrorists and Latin American dictators, has been accused by conservatives of opening old wounds by launching his probe into the disappearances under Franco, who ruled Spain for 36 years until his death in 1975.

In 1977, two years after Franco`s death, all political parties agreed to put the civil war and dictatorship behind them, and Madrid granted an amnesty for crimes committed under the general`s iron-fisted rule.

But in recent years the `pacto de olvido` or `pact of forgetting` began to crumble, as associations emerged seeking to recover the remains of the missing.

Already about 170 graves have been investigated and thousands of victims’ remains have been returned to their families in the past few years.

Garzon`s mission recently got the backing of the UN Commission on Human Rights, which last week `recommended that Spain abolish the amnesty law of 1977 and take legislative measures to guarantee the non-applicability of statutory limitations to crimes against humanity`.

`Also, a fact-find commission should be established and the families should be allowed to identify and exhume the bodies of the victims,` it said.