Quoting Jesús Palacios’s & Stanley G. Payne’s Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, page 371:

Franco believed devoutly in the efficacy of relics, his personal favorite being the remains of a petrified hand of Santa Teresa de Ávila, the most prominent woman in the history of the Spanish Church, founder of the Discalced Carmelites. Preserved for more than three centuries in a Carmelite convent in Portugal, the hand had been transferred to a convent in Ronda in 1925. During the looting of the convent by revolutionaries in 1936, the relic had been seized, only to turn up during the Nationalist conquest of Málaga in February 1937, discovered in a suitcase full of cash and jewels.

It was immediately awarded to the caudillo, and after a solemn ceremony of purification in Salamanca, he retained possession of it for the duration of the conflict. Franco gained permission from the Church in 1939 to keep it for his lifetime; he maintained it in a special reliquary in his bedroom (but not on his nightstand, as the sensationalist version long had it). Santa Teresa was hailed as the “santa de la raza” — saint of the nation — and this woman from a family of Jewish origin became Franco’s personal patron saint, his favorite Spanish religious figure.²¹

Carlos M. N. Eire’s From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain, pages 381 & 458:

Generalissimo Francisco Franco promoted the cult of St. Teresa as protectress of the army of Catholic Spain and went as far as to award a medal, La Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, in 1940 to a relic of the hand of St. Teresa that he had rescued from the Republican “bolsheviks” and kept nearby thereafter.³¹ […] Though large relics such as the arm and hand attracted much attention, even the smallest particles of Teresa’s skin would suffice for a miraculous cure.⁷⁷ Ribera himself reported a miracle, claiming to have been cured of insufferable pains in his feet and legs. In this miracle, a relic of Teresa became a substitute for continual medication.