Spain  - People with no links to the family of Spain's late dictator Francisco Franco on Thursday entered his summer residence in the north-western region of Galicia for the first time, local officials said.

Three experts entered the mansion to examine its state in order to assess the possibility of opening it to the public.

The Franco family, which opposes such plans, had repeatedly barred experts entry, but a court order finally forced it to open the building known as Pazo de Meiras.

The late 19th-century imitation castle with three towers, located near La Coruna, was given to Franco by a group of supporters in 1939, the year the general won the three-year civil war he had sparked with his military uprising.

Franco then ruled Spain until his death in 1975.

The "gift from the people" to Franco was financed with donations that were often not voluntary in practice. Local people have complained of having been forced out of land that was given to Franco.

The Galician authorities want to allow the public to visit the building, where the writer Emilia Pardo Bazan once lived.

The opening of the Pazo de Meiras was "very important," historian Ian Gibson said.

"It is fundamental to recover the historic memory," Gibson said in a reference to Spain's attempts to face the entire truth about the civil war and the Franco dictatorship.

The Socialist government last year pushed through a so-called Law of Historic Memory, which includes measures to rehabilitate the memory of Franco's leftist republican victims.

About half a million people from both sides were killed in the war, after which tens of thousands of Franco opponents died in reprisals, prisons and labour camps.(dpa)