I first went to Portugal on holiday in the summer of 1974 shortly after the April revolution, and when I started to work for The Times of London in 1975, covering Spain’s transition to democracy, I used to go to Portugal from time to time. On one of those visits in 1977 I interviewed Don Juan, the grandfather of King Felipe, at his home in exile in Estoril. I was back in Estoril last year for the first time in many years, staying not far from where Don Juan lived in Villa Giralda in the for me appropriately named street Rua de Inglaterra. That visit gave me a dizzying sense of history, as I also know King Juan Carlos and Felipe.

I will now give you a broad brush summary of the relationship between Spain and Portugal.

A little history

Portugal lay under Spanish dominance between 1580 and 1640 and after the restoration of independence the two countries lived like ‘Siamese twins joined at the back’ for more than 300 years until they joined the European Union (EU) at the same time in 1986 and came face to face. The Spanish film director Luis Buñuel recounts in his memoirs that Portugal seemed further away for Spaniards than India, and for the Portuguese poet Rui Bello Madrid was one of the most ‘distant’ cities from Lisbon.

Portugal managed to remain free from permanent Spanish domination by belonging to different international alliances. The country could easily have gone the way of Catalonia, Andalusia and other regions absorbed by Castile into a united Spain. Portugal is often described as Britain’s ‘oldest ally’ –this goes back to 1386 when England allied itself permanently with Portugal after English archers helped to secure the Portuguese throne from the Castilians. This alliance was solidified when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II of England, and Charles then played a part in achieving Spanish recognition of Portugal’s independence.

There is a more than 200-year old dormant claim by Portugal to territories ceded to Spain around the town of Olivenza near the border with Elvas. Portugal does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over Olivenza and as a result the border between the two countries in the Olivenza area has never been clearly defined.

Even under the right-wing dictatorships of General Franco (1939-75) in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar (1932-68) in Portugal the two countries ignored one another. Nevertheless, in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, and as the Spanish Civil War was ending, they signed a treaty of friendship to mutually protect their interests and independence.

Franco played a double game: he harboured ambitions of taking over Portugal with Axis help, but was happy to allay suspicions of his designs and also to provide a channel to the British in the event that the war went their way.

‘We were taught to hate Spain’, declared Major Vitor Alves, born in 1931 and one of the prime movers in the 1974 revolution that ended Portugal’s dictatorship (under Salazar’s successor Marcelo Caetano).

Spain and Portugal followed similar political and economic paths during the 20th century: Portugal deposed the monarchy in 1910 and declared a Republic (Spain followed the Republican route in 1931, which was cut short by its 1936-39 civil war); both countries had long dictatorships (1932-74 for Portugal and 1939-75 for Spain); both countries liberalised their heavily protected economies to varying degrees (Spain began in the 1950s and Portugal not really until the 1970s), both joined the then European Economic Community in 1986 and both were founder members in 1999 of European Monetary Union (the euro).

Spain and Portugal are part of the same military and economic alliances (Nato and the EU) and Portugal no longer feels threatened, at least militarily. Nevertheless, the Portuguese still mistrust Spain, epitomised in their still popular saying: ‘Neither good winds nor good marriages come from Spain’. This is because of Spain’s economic invasion of the country as a result of EU membership. All the more reason then why Portugal was jubilant when its football team knocked Spain out of the 2004 Eurocup.

On the international front, Spain and Portugal, once former rivals in Latin America (Brazil, the most populous country, was under Portuguese rule for three centuries), work together in the Iberoamerican Community of Nations, founded in 1991, which holds annual summit meetings of heads of state and government.

Economy

Comparative Indicators, Spain and Portugal (2015)
Spain Portugal
Population (millions) 46.4 10.6
Nominal GDP (US trillion) 1.47 230bn
Per capita GDP ($) 33,000 22,000
Per capita GDP (EU-28 = 100), 2014 91 78
Unemployment rate (%) 20.9 12.0
(*) Production workers in the manufacturing sector.
Source: Eurostat, Economist Intelligence Unit and Confederation of Swedish Enterprise.

Spain is the main supplier of goods to Portugal (around one-third of Portugal’s total imports). Spain’s exports more to its tiny neighbour (7.2% in 2015) than to the whole of Latin America (5.9% of the total in the same period) and to the United States (4.6%). Portugal, a natural extension of Spain’s domestic market, is Spain’s fifth largest client after France, Germany, Italy and the UK.

Portugal, in turn, supplies Spain with 4% of its imports, the sixth largest amount.

Spain runs a large trade surplus with Portugal: more than €6.5 bn in 2015.

Spain’s Main Exports to Portugal

Motor industry components and accessories
Cars
Steel
Fuel and lubricants
Plastic raw materials and semi manufactures
Computer hardware
Source: ICEX.

Portugal’s Main Exports to Spain

Chemical products
Clothing
Motor industry components and accessories
Steel
Bottles and packaging
Wood and paper semi-manufactures
Source: ICEX.

Around 3,000 Spanish companies operate in Portugal. Several companies have strong positions in the Portuguese economy, most notably Santander, Spain’s largest bank, which acquired the Totta Group (market share of 11%) in 2000 and last month acquired from the state the failed Banco Internacional do Funchal (Banif) for €150 million. The purchase of Banif increases Santander’s market share in loans and deposits in the country from 12% to 14.5% and makes it the second-largest privately-held bank after BCP-Milenium. Banif is the main bank in Madeira and the Azores.

Adding in Bankinter (which acquired Barclays’ Portuguese unit last year), Popular and BBVA, all of which own banks in Portugal, and the total market share of Spanish banks in Portugal is around 20%. According to some analysts, the European Central Bank regards Portugal, for banking purposes, as a Spanish region and was happy for Santander, the euro zone’s second largest bank and one of the global systemically important banks (meaning it is too big to fail), to acquire the failed Banif.

BBVA, Spain’s second largest bank, bought Lloyds Bank in Portugal in 1991. Lloyds had been in Portugal for 128 years and was known simply as o banco inglês, the English bank. For a bank from Portugal’s oldest ally to decide to pull out was a bad enough blow for the government. Selling it to Portugal’s historical enemy was tantamount to being stabbed in the back by your best friend.

While Santander has been strengthening its presence in Portugal, BBVA has been scaling it back.

Other big Spanish companies in Portugal include El Corte Inglés, the giant department store chain which chose Lisbon as its first venture outside Spain; Prosegur (security) and Sacyr which owns Somague, the largest construction company;. Cepsa and Repsol have petrol stations. Spanish fashion stores like Zara, Massimo Dutti and Pull & Bear, all owned by the Inditex group, have clustered around the landmark Corte Inglés store creating an ‘Avenida de Espanha’ in the heart of Lisbon, a symbol of Spanish business prowess. Inditex has 339 stores in Portugal at the latest count.

Spanish direct investment in Portugal averaged €1.15 billion a year between 1993 and 2003 compared to €415 million of Portuguese investment in Spain during the same period. Between 1994 and 2004 Spanish investment in Portugal was just over €1 billion a year and Portuguese in Spain €375 million per annum. In the first nine months of 2015, Portugal’s direct investment in Spain was down to €41.4 million compared to Spanish investment of €222 million in the same period.

The strong Spanish presence in the context of the single European market is a sensitive issue as it plays on Portuguese fears that they are being swallowed up by their neighbour. Furthermore, most of the investment is in highly visible sectors such as banking and construction. Spanish net direct investment in Portugal between 1992 and 2002, in the first wave, amounted to €6.4bn, compared with €5.1bn for the UK, €4.2bn for the Netherlands and €2.4bn for Germany.

The fears may be exaggerated, but they are the logical consequence of a small country sharing a border with a much larger and more powerful one. Fifty four per cent of Portugal’s territory borders Spain.

In what was known as the ‘patriots’ manifesto’, 40 top economists and businessmen warned in 2003 of the danger of Portugal’s ‘decision-making centres’ –a euphemism for its biggest companies– being moved abroad. Jorge Sampaio, the then president of Portugal, commented that ‘without centres of decision-making, there is no nation’. Newspapers at that time abounded with headlines like ‘Spanish Armada’, whenever there is a major Spanish acquisition, and magazine covers d the border with Spain and mad Madrid the capital of Portugal. One Portuguese magazine summed up the situation by putting the following on its cover: ‘We go shopping in El Corte Inglés, buy our clothes in Zara, book our holidays at Viajes Halcón and get our glasses at Multiópticas. Even our savings are in Spanish banks’. The weekly newspaper Expresso ran a section called ‘The Spanish Question’ during February 2004 with all manner of opinions for and against (mainly the latter) the hypothetical idea of Portugal losing its independence and becoming part of Spain. I believe these fears no longer exist. Perhaps our Portuguese guests can enlighten me.

The flow of trade and investment, however, is not all one way. Just as Portugal is Spain’s largest market for its exports, so Spain is also Portugal’s main export market . More than 300 Portuguese companies operate in Spain. The main ones include Sonae, which owns Tafisa, the leading wood-based board company (with companies in Germany, the UK, France and Africa), Galp, which has more than 240 petrol stations, the transport company Luís Simões and Electricidade de Portugal (EDP), which has acquired Hidrocantábrico, Spain’s fourth largest power company.

Portugal’s main banking presence in Spain is through Caixa Geral de Depósitos, which acquired Banco Extremadura from BBVA in 1991, Banco Luso Espanhol from Chase Manhattan in 1991 and Banco Simeón from Argentaria in 1995. The combined market share of the three banks is small. The failed Banco Espírito Santo, which was split into two banks in 2014, is or was also present in Spain. I am not sure of the current situation.

The pace of integration of the two economies was stepped up when the two countries began to operate in July 2007 the much-delayed Single Iberian Electricity Market (known as MIBEL). The original start up date was January 2003. Spain is western Europe’s fifth largest power market and Portugal the eleventh largest. Together, they form a market slightly larger than Italy’s. Both markets are reasonably similar as regards generation. The Spanish market is more diversified as it has nuclear energy.

Development of an Iberian gas hub has been slow. The Iberian natural gas and Liquid Natural Gas market has around 7.5 million consumers. Neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese gas system has significant gas production of their own, which means that virtually all Natural Gas consumed in Iberia is imported, either via pipeline or via Liquid Natural Gas tankers.

The Spanish system is interconnected with France, with Algeria (via the Medgaz pipeline) and with Morocco (via the Maghreb pipeline), while the Spanish and the Portuguese systems are interconnected via the Badajoz and Tuy pipelines.

The project with the greatest potential impact on the integration of Spain and Portugal is the building of high-speed rail links between the two countries if it ever happens. This is something that has been talked about for years. As someone who loves Lisbon, I hope it is built during my life time. I first went to Lisbon in 1974 on the overnight train and I remember how long it took. A high speed train between the two capitals would cut the travel time from 10 to three hours. Madrid and Lisbon are already linked by a dual carriageway that goes virtually all the way between the two capitals.

The economic progress made by both countries, as measured by per capita income, has been strong over the past 50 or so years. Spain’s per capita income rose from 60% of the EU-15 average in 1960 to a peak of 103% of the EU 28 average in 2007 and Portugal’s from 40% of the EU-15 average to a high of 81% of the EU 28 average in 2009. Both countries’ living standards have declined in recent years as they have been hard hit by varying degree of recession. Booth are now slowly recovering.

As well as a much larger economy, Spain also has the advantage of a more dynamic private sector than Portugal’s. This is not to belittle the efforts that Portugal has made in some quarters to create stronger private companies. The sheer size of the Spanish economy makes it easier for Spanish companies to become bigger through mergers and acquisitions and so attain critical mass and economies of scale. Spanish companies have been much bolder in venturing abroad, most clearly exemplified by the massive direct investment abroad.

The Spanish economy is six times larger than Portugal’s, but Spanish direct investment abroad is 11 times higher at $674 billion, according to the latest UNCTAD figures.

Galicia and Northern Portugal

Nowhere are the ties between Spain and Portugal stronger than between Galicia and Northern Portugal. The two regions, on either side of the border, with a shared history, culture, language (to some extent) and economy, particularly in fisheries, form what is called a Euro-region. Their combined population is more than 6 million. They work closely together on various projects which have helped to boost the development of two of the poorest regions of the EU-15 and overcome their peripherality on the edge of Europe.

Both regions benefited a lot from EU structural fund as their per capita GDP was less than 75% of the EU average (known as Objective 1 regions).

The relationship between Galicia and North Portugal was strengthened in 1991 with the creation of a Working Community between the two regions. The so-called Territorial Co-operation Communities combine all the Galician town councils and Portuguese municipal councils along the border. There is also official co-operation between trade unions, consumer institutes and employers’ associations. As an autonomous region Galicia is able to negotiate some matters directly with the Portuguese government in Lisbon without having to refer them to Spain’s central government in Madrid.

Both regions have dynamic private sectors (Galicia, for example, is the home of the world-renowned fashion group Inditex and Porto is the bastion city of Portuguese entrepreneurs).

Lastly, there are some similarities in the political situation. The centre right Portugal Ahead coalition won the most seats in last October’s parliamentary election, but lost its absolute majority, as did Spain’s Popular Party in last December’s election. This led to the formation in Portugal of a minority Socialist government backed by Communist, Green and Left Bloc parties. The Left Bloc is the sister party of Greece’s anti-austerity Syriza and thus an ally of Spain’s Podemos. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Socialist leader, went to Lisbon last month to meet his political counterpart, Prime Minister Antonio Costa, and learn for himself how the coalition was formed. Whether Sánchez, who has been entrusted with forming a government, is successful in emulating Costa and forming a so called progressive coalition remains to be seen. It is a question we would all like answered soon.

Seven killed in Taliban attack on Spanish embassy in Kabul.
Popular Party forecast to win the election but far from an absolute majority.
Constitutional Court strikes down Catalan independence resolution.
Ten takeaways from the European Commission’s surveillance report.
Abengoa struggles to stave off bankruptcy.

http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/wcm/connect/a64f74004af9e8a284d8cec71300caaf/123_InsideSpain_ElcanoNewsletter.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=a64f74004af9e8a284d8cec71300caaf

Talk to be given at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 10.
http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events/2016/april-10/spain-80-years-after-start-of-civil-war-change-of-a-nation

Talk to be given at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 9.
http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events/2016/april-9

My post for Oxford University Press, tied to my book.
http://blog.oup.com/2015/11/spain-40-years-general-franco/

Forty years ago on November 23 1975, a granite slab weighing more than a ton and a half sealed off the embalmed body of the chief protagonist of nearly half a century of Spanish history. General Franco, “Caudillo by the grace of God”, as his coins proclaimed, Generalissimo of the armed forces, head of state and head of government (the latter until 1973), was buried at the colossal mausoleum built over the course of 18 years partly by political prisoners at the Valley of the Fallen, in the Guadarrama mountains near Madrid. The world’s largest memorial cross (a whopping 152 metres) towers over the sinister place.

Franco had died on November 20. On the opposite side of the altar is buried José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Fascist-rooted Falange, which became the nucleus of Franco’s official party known as the National Movement. Primo de Rivera was executed by a Republican firing squad on November 20, 1936, a few months after the start of the terrible three-year civil war, giving that day an almost mystical significance for diehard Francoists.

Most Europe’s leaders snubbed Franco in death as they snubbed him in life and did not attend the funeral.

During the two days preceding Franco’s burial, around 300,000 people filed by the casket at the Oriente Palace to pay their last respects. Some Spaniards, particularly his opponents, joked that they queued in the freezing temperatures to make sure the dictator really had died.

The 37-year-old King Juan Carlos, appointed Franco’s successor in 1969 when he decided to re-instate the Bourbon dynasty was not very enthusiastically received when he delivered his inaugural speech to the Spanish parliament. Juan Carlos’s grandfather, Alfonso XIII, had gone into exile in 1931 before the proclamation of the Republic that was followed by the civil war and his father Don Juan was regarded as too liberal by Franco so the dictator skipped a generation.

I was a young foreign correspondent at the time, working for The Times in Madrid. The Spanish and international press coverage given to Franco’s death was massive. Here are the special editions of ABC and Arriba, which I have kept over the years. They both recount in great detail Franco’s military exploits –he was Europe’s youngest general at the age of 33 reputedly since Napoleon.

No more long nights wondering whether this was the one that would hold out the prospect of a new dawn, or recounting the joke of why Spaniards had short index fingers – because they had spent years saying “this is the year that Franco will die.” It had taken the dictator 35 days to die, with endless medical bulletins that ran out of adjectives to describe his deteriorating condition.

At the time of Franco’s death, Gibraltar’s border with Spain, had been closed for six years and it was to remain so for another seven until it was partially re-opened in December 1982. My wife and I suffered the effects of that closure; we got married here in 1974 and in order to do so had to travel from Madrid to Algeciras, ferry to Tangiers, ferry to Gibraltar and then back the same way.

Fortunately, Spain’s transition to democracy moved more quickly than the opening of the border, though in fits and starts, as most of the country fervently wanted change. According to a survey in 1975, 75% of respondents wanted press freedom, 71% religious freedom, and 58% trade union freedom.

The country was ripe for change. Laureano López Rodo, the chief architect of a series of development plans in the 1960s that began to move the economy away from autarky and toward liberalisation, had rather prophetically said at that time, “We shall start thinking about democracy when income per head of the population exceeds $1,000.” Per capita income crossed the $500 line in 1963 and $1,000 in 1971, four years before Franco died. By then there was a solid middle class.

King Juan Carlos was the engine that drove the reforms. At that time, we should remember, he was known as Juan Carlos el Breve and Juan Carlos el Tonto by those on the radical left. One of the great mysteries of the transition is whether Franco knew what would happen after he died. Afterall, Juan Carlos, born in Rome, had been sent to Spain in 1948 at the age of 10 by his exiled father Don Juan to be rigorously educated under the watchful eye of Franco. He was a sad-looking child, separated for long periods from his parents and drawn into the cold bosom of Franco, who never had a son. Furthermore, his younger brother, Alfonso, had died in 1956 at the age of 14, while the two of them were playing with a loaded gun, apparently a present given to Juan Carlos by Franco.

When Juan Carlos was appointed Franco’s heir he had to swear allegiance to the regime’s principles. When I spoke at length with the king in 1977 and asked him what Franco had told him about his role after the dictator died Juan Carlos said Franco had told him, “When you are head of state you will be able to do some of the things which I have been unable to do”, and did not elaborate further. It was the only remark Franco apparently made about his conception of the king’s role. Franco had famously left his regime and its institutions “tied up, and well tied up”, and it fell to Juan Carlos to unravel the knots. He was much astuter than he was given credit for, and today, after his wise abdication last year in favour of his son Felipe, he is becoming an unjustifiably forgotten figure. The king himself appreciated a joke told against him when I spoke to him. “Why was Juan Carlos crowned in a submarine? Because deep down he is not so stupid.”

Few dispute the success of the transition. Even though Gibraltarians were physically cut off from Spain while it happened – by 1982 when the border was re-opened the political transition can be said to have been over as the 1978 democratic constitution was four years old – I am sure they observed it keenly.

I am not going to recount the transition to democracy blow by blow. Suffice to say Spaniards approved a democratic constitution in 1978, joined the European Union in 1986, and became a founder member of the euro zone in 1999. Rather I will spell out some of the changes over the last 40 years, not all of them positive, and tell you where Spain is today. Here are some of the most dramatic changes, and I cannot avoid bombarding you with some numbers.

• Economic output increased twelvefold between 1975 and 2015 to around $1 trillion.
• Per capita income rose from $3,000 to more than $30,000.
• The structure of the economy is very different: Agriculture’s share of output dropped from 9% to 2.5%; industry including construction from 39% to 23% and services increased from 52% to 74%.
• Employment by sectors has changed even more: only 4% of jobs today are in agriculture compared to 22% in 1975, 14% of employment is in industry and construction, down from 38%, while services employ 76%.
• Exports of goods and services more than tripled to 32% of GDP.
• The inward stock of foreign direct investment in Spain surged from $5.1 billion in 1980 (the earliest recorded figure) to $722 billion in 2014.
• The outward stock of direct investment jumped from $1.9 billion to $674 billion, with the creation of well known multinationals.
• The number of tourists rose from 27 million to an estimated 68 million this year.
• There were 123 cars per 1,000 people in 1975 and more than 500 today.
• The population rose by 10.4 million to 46.4 million, mostly over a 10-year period as a result of an unprecedented influx of immigrants. In the decade before the 2008-13 crisis Spain received more immigrants proportional to its population than any other EU country.
• Average life expectancy for men and women was 73.3 years in 1975; today it is 82 years. Spanish women live 85 years, almost the longest in the world.
• Close to 30% of the population was under the age of 15 in 1975; today it is 15%. Those over the age of 65 rose from 10% to more than 18%.
• The average number of children per woman has more than halved to 1.3, one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.

These changes give you a good idea of the profound transformation in Spain in the last 40 years, which in the history of time is a drop in the ocean. Spain telescoped its changes into a much shorter period than probably any other European country.

Spain also became one of the world’s most socially progressive countries, a far cry from the rigid and asphyxiating morality of the Franco regime and the strictures of the powerful Catholic Church. In 2005, Spain legalised marriage between same-sex couples. Only three other countries at that time had taken this step – Holland, Belgium and Canada. Fast-track divorces were also introduced that year under which couples no longer had to be separated for a year prior to legal proceedings and there was no requirement to attribute responsibility for the failure of the marriage. Divorce was not legalised until 1981; before then a marriage could be dissolved only through the arduous procedure of annulment, which was available only after a lengthy series of administrative steps and was thus accessible only to the relatively wealthy.

In a country whose exaggerated respect for masculine values added the word ‘machismo’ to the English language, women’s position in society has advanced considerably. During the Franco regime a married woman, for example, could not apply for a passport or sign a contract without her husband’s permission.
Women today account for 46% of the working population, up from 30% in 1975. Female university students outnumber male graduates and hold 40% of the seats in parliament. Society is also increasingly secular and less influenced by the Catholic Church, a pillar of the Franco regime until its last years.

In the Basque Country, the terrorist group ETA, which has murdered 857 people in its fight for an independent state (95% of them since 1975), has been defeated by the rule of law. The group declared a ‘definitive’ ceasefire four years ago, although it has yet to lay down its arms.

Most of the points I have just listed are positive. The most obviously negative one is the whopping unemployment rate of more than 20%, as a result of the economy’s crash as of 2008. The economy was going so well in the decade before then that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister between 2004 and 2011, adopted a football metaphor and proclaimed in September 2007 that Spain ‘has joined the Champions League.’ That same year he also called Spain’s economic model ‘an international model of solvency and efficiency.’ He lived to regret these words.

The truth is that Spain’s boom was a false bonanza. The long period of what Spaniards called las vacas gordas (fat cows) was mainly fuelled by the labour-intensive and debt-fuelled construction and property sectors. The booming economy encouraged people to go on a spending spree and live beyond their means. Credit was cheap, thanks to Spain belonging to the euro zone. At one stage interest rates were even negative as Spain’s inflation was higher than the cost of borrowing.

The number of housing starts in 2006 was 865,000 – more than Germany, France and the UK combined. Such frenetic building was only made possible by the influx of immigrants (3.6 million between 2000 and 2007) and created a lopsided economy. The housing stock increased by 5.7 million during the boom, the equivalent of almost 30% of the existing stock. The impact on employment was dramatic: between 1995 and 2007, eight million jobs were created. The number of jobholders, which stood at 12 million in 1995 (roughly the same size as two decades earlier), increased to 20.5 million 2007. Today, it is 18 million.

The construction frenzy was not only confined to the building of too many houses, half a million of which new ones are still unsold today and more than a million including second hand properties.

Too many ghost airports were also built. Take the airports at Castellón and Ciudad Real. The former was opened by Carlos Fabra, the longstanding Popular Party head of the Castellón provincial government, even though it did not have all the permits to operate. Amazing as it may sound, Fabra justified the opening on the grounds that ‘anyone who wants to can visit the runway, the terminal and the control tower and walk around them, something they could not do if aircraft were taking off.’ There is a 24-metre sculpture of Fabra outside the airport. I am glad to say Fabra is in prison, though for other reasons. In September, Ryanair began to operate the first scheduled flights from Castellón in four years.

The €1 billion airport at Ciudad Real (previously known as Don Quixote airport after the deluded protagonist of Cervantes’ novel) was meant to be an alternative to Madrid’s airport – it has a 4km runway capable of taking an Airbus A380m, the world’s largest passenger jet. It was opened in 2008 by the region’s then Socialist government. It went bankrupt in 2010 and was closed in 2012. Efforts to sell the airport have so far failed.

Public funds were also wasted on building pharaonic projects. The Popular Party Madrid regional government embarked in 2008 on the so-called City of Justice comprising 12 circular buildings near the airport. The judicial complex covering all parts of the justice system, the biggest of its kind in the world, was due to be completed in 2014. Only one building was finished, the Madrid Forensic Anatomical Institute, and that is lying idle and has to be cleared periodically of rabbits

Not for nothing did the word fiesta originate in Spain, and it began to end when global credit crunch erupted in August 2007. Spain’s economic model was particularly vulnerable.

When the massive property bubble burst, house prices plummeted (by more than 35% between 2008 and 2014), some savings banks teetered on the brink of collapse (they were bailed out by a €41 billion euro zone programme, successfully exited in January 2014), many property developers went to the wall – unfinished properties along the Costa del Sol still bear witness to this – and the unemployment rate tripled to a peak of 27%.

Jobs were shed almost as quickly as they had been created during the boom. Due to much lower firing costs, the first people to lose their job were those on temporary contracts, particularly men, in the construction sector, many of whom had left school at 16.

Nowhere was this more rife than in Villacañas which became the door-making capital of Spain. At the height of the boom, this town of 10,000 inhabitants had 10 door manufacturing plants employing 6,000 people and producing 11 million doors a year, 60% of the national total. Hardly anyone stayed on at school.

The early school-leaving rate peaked at 31% in 2009, more than double the European Union average. It was down to 22% last year, still very high, as students had no option but to continue their education. These unqualified workers face a bleak future. They form a “lost generation.” It would make eminent sense to raise the school-leaving age in Spain from 16 to 18.

Political factors were also very much at the root of Spain’s crisis, particularly the degeneration of key institutions (the judiciary, parliament, regulatory bodies, the Court of Auditors, etc.) that were colonised (along with the savings banks) by the two largest parties, the Popular Party and the Socialists. The savings banks were also appropriated and by the nationalist parties in their home regions, as well as trade unions. These institutions failed to fulfil their accountability role, were discredited and lost legitimacy. The political class became an extractive elite. An effective system of checks and balances would have gone a long way toward reducing the scale of crony capitalism and hence the crisis.

Those of you who read the Spanish press could be forgiven for believing that corruption in Spain has reached African proportions. In fact, it has not sunk to the level of Italy, which is ranked 69th out of 175 countries in the latest corruption perception index ranking by the Berlin-based Transparency International, the only international measure we have, while Spain was in 37th position. Spain’s score in this index was 60 out of 100 compared to Italy’s 43 – the nearer to 100, the cleaner the country.
So Spain still has a long way to fall.

When I speak of corruption in Spain, I do not mean that the civil service does not function for you unless you grease palms. Most of the corruption was construction sector –related, especially at the level of municipal and regional governments and in the sphere of re-zoning of land and building permits. More than 800 town halls (10% of the total) today are under investigation and several thousand people have been accused in corruption cases.

At one point Spain accounted for one-quarter of the total number of 500 euro notes in circulation in the euro zone countries, although the Spanish economy only represents around 11% of the total euro zone economy. Ordinary Spaniards referred to these notes, used in black economy transactions, as “bin Ladens” (in reference to Osama bin Laden), because everyone knew they existed and what they looked like but few had seen them or admitted to doing so.

The corruption problem – and all the cases now in the limelight refer to misdeeds that happened during the boom period – was facilitated by Spain’s justice system which moves at a snail’s pace. Not only does it move slowly, partly because it is underfunded and poorly resourced, but the system’s governing body is politicized. The justice system is one area that missed out during the transition period.

I mentioned Carlos Fabra, the airport man, earlier on: it took a staggering 10 years for his case to come to trial. The backlog of all cases was highlighted last year by photos in the Spanish press showing files piled up in the toilets of courts.

The most high profile cases are those of Luis Bárcenas, the former treasurer of the ruling Popular Party, the sister and brother-in-law of King Felipe, Rodrigo Rato, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and the family of Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia for 23 years. Barcenas is accused of paying secret cash payments to the party’s leaders over 18 years, including allegedly to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and receiving donations to the party from companies, mainly construction ones, in return for favours.

The Infanta Cristina has been indicted as part of a four-year probe into her husband, Inaki Urdangarín, who faces charges of money-laundering and fraud. Urdangarín is accused of embezzling about €6 million in public contracts through a non-profit foundation he set up. If convicted she could face up to four years in prison and Urdangarín up to 19 years.

Rato, a former economy minister and chairman of Bankia, the bank whose collapse sparked the EU’s bail out, is accused, among other things, of tax fraud.

The Pujol family is embroiled in multiple cases of corruption, hiding money, tax evasion, etc

As for enchufismo and nepotism (the negative side of the otherwise admirable importance given to the family, and which has been the country’s saviour), the head of the Tribunal de Cuentas, the Court of Auditors, had to explain himself to a parliamentary committee after it was discovered that around 100 of the 700 employees were related to the Tribunal’s current and former senior management and to its trade union representatives. In another case, the Popular Party’s cacique in Orense, José Luis Baltar, was disqualified from public office for nine years after he personally appointed 104 people to the Diputación Provincial which he headed for 25 years and which is now run by his son. If Spain were a meritocracy, the chairman of Madrid’s failed bid to host the Olympic Games in 2020, a post where speaking English is vital, would not have got the job. He responded to a question in English by the International Olympic Committee at the crucial meeting to decide the winning country with the words, “No listen the ask”, a peculiar way of saying he did not hear or understand the question put to him.

Spain is now out of a long recession and is growing at one of the fastest rates in the EU, but from a low base as it has yet to recover the pre-crisis level of economic output. At the height of the false bonanza period the jobless rate was 8% – a level that is regarded as a disaster by the UK and the US, for example, not to speak of Gibraltar. Incidentally, Spain enacted 52 labour market reforms between the 1980 Statute of Workers’ Rights, which laid the foundations of post-Franco labour relations, and the end of 2015, a world record, and the jobs market is still dysfunctional.

I will not bore you with the technical details. Suffice to say that an economic model excessively based on bricks and mortar and tourism does not generate jobs on a sustained basis, there is still a gulf between insiders (those on permanent contracts) and outsiders (those on temporary contracts) and a more knowledge-based economy is something of a pipedream with an education system that has many problems.

In the German government’s eyes, Spain is something of a poster boy for the benefits of its orthodox austerity measures, which it certainly is when compared to basket case countries like Greece. Pensions have been cut, social expenditure reduced, public sector wages frozen and income taxes and VAT increased.

Not surprisingly, massive unemployment, austerity and corruption have changed the mould of politics. Like Britain, the political landscape is changing, though in one important aspect it is different: Spain does not have a UKIP style party – which is quite remarkable given the influx of immigrants who have been successfully absorbed. When I came to Spain in 1975 I was one of 165,000 foreigners; today I am one of around 5 million, and that number excludes naturalised Spaniards, 1.2 million of whom are Latin Americans.

Two new upstart parties at the national level, the centre right Ciudadanos (which means Citizens) and the anti-austerity leftist Podemos (which translates as We Can) are challenging the conservative Popular Party and the Socialists, the two parties that have alternated in power since 1982. For the first time since then, the general election in Spain this December 20 will be a four horse race, and opinion polls show none of them will win an absolute majority. Spain is one of the very few countries in the European Union not to have had a coalition government in the last 40 years. The last thing Spain needs is a gridlocked parliament.

Podemos was born out of the month-long occupation in May, 2011 by thousands of mainly young people of the Puerta del Sol square in the heart of Madrid. This grassroots movement, articulated through mobile phones and the Internet, quickly gathered supporters around Spain and, incidentally, inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement. Supporters ranged from anti-capitalists, workers who had lost their jobs, and pensioners hit by cuts to their payments, to homeowners whose properties had been repossessed because they could not pay their mortgages and university students who saw no future.

The most memorable slogan to come out of this movement was the one shouted in front of Congress when protestors waved loaves of bread above their heads and screamed: “There isn’t enough bread for so many chorizos!” A chorizo is a swindler or cheat and not just a spicy sausage, often sliced and served in a bocadillo.

Podemos, which became a political party in January 2014, stunned the status quo by winning 1.2 million votes (8% of the total) and five seats in the European elections. For the first time since the re-establishment of Spain’s democracy, the Popular Party and the Socialists captured between them less than 50% of the total votes in an election. In the municipal elections last May Podemos and its allies took control of the Madrid and Barcelona town halls. The Popular Party suffered its worst result in 20 years.
Podemos’ founders come from the faculty of political sciences at Madrid’s Complutense University, well known for its long-standing commitment to far-left ideology. Pablo Iglesias, the party’s leader, was a member of the Communist Youth Union of Spain, part of the anti-globalisation movement and an advisor to the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s autocratic and economically populist president, from whom his movement received money. The 36-year-old pony-tailed Iglesias still lives in a modest flat in Vallecas, one of Madrid’s poorest areas, on a graffiti-daubed 1980s estate of apartment blocks. “Defend your happiness, organize your rage,” reads one graffiti slogan.

Iglesias broke with protocol when he met King Felipe and gave him the DVD of the first series of Game of Thrones. Iglesias said he chose this particular series because it depicted an “old world falling apart. The conflicting interests of the various families have plunged the kingdoms into misery, violence and sadness. In this panorama, new leaders, new armies, appear from beyond the established frontiers to make their challenge with new options, new ways of relating to a people tired of so many wars.” It was not a very subtle message.

Podemos was riding high in the voter intention polls until January of this year when its share of the votes peaked at 24%, ahead of the Socialists, and this month it was down to almost 11%.

Podemos can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. The party is trying to be all things to all men. Elections today tend to be won by the party that convinces the largest share of the electorate that it occupies the centre ground. Podemos is engaging in transversal politics –seeking ways to cross and possibly redraw borders that mark politicised differences.
In an unconvincing U-turn, it now pitches itself as a Nordic style social democrat party.

Ciudadanos, on the other hand, is on a roll. Its support has risen from 3% in January to almost 15% this month. It will probably be the kingmaker, getting into bed with either the PP or the Socialists in a coalition government, depending on which one gets the most votes. The PP, with 29% of votes in this month’s poll compared to the Socialists’ 25%, is betting on voters returning it to office because of the turnaround in the economy – the number of unemployed has dropped below 5 million for the first time since 2011. It will play the fear card.

The market-friendly Ciudadanos, led by the 35-year-old Albert Rivera, started life in Catalonia eight years ago and won three seats in the 2006 regional (nine in the snap 2012 election). Few outside of Catalonia had heard of the party. It began to be better known after campaigning for a ‘no’ vote in the non-binding referendum on independence held a year ago in defiance of a ban by the Constitutional Court. Ciudadanos opposed the independence movement. In last September’s Catalan election, pitched by the Catalan government as a de facto referendum on independence, Ciudadanos won 18% of the vote, double the share of Podemos and making it the second largest party in the region, ahead of both the Popular Party and the Socialists.

Rivera says the difference between his party and Podemos is that whereas Ciudadanos wants justice, Podemos wants revenge. Its short-lived rise was something of a paradox. Spain’s ideological self-placement scale has changed little over the last 20 years, rarely dropping below 4.5 where 5.0 is the center (0 is extreme left and 10 extreme right).

Spaniards do not want a rupture with the recent past, with what a Podemos ideologue calls the “regime of 1978” in reference to the democratic constitution of that year – which despite its defects engineered the best phase of Spain’s history in terms of prosperity and peaceful co-existence. What Spaniards want is for the system to work fairly, without privileges and impunity for the political class.

They also want more compromise between political parties. Incidentally, the Spanish language does not have a word for compromise. Compromiso is a false friend: it means commitment.

The monarchy has served Spain well. Yes, it has been tarnished by the corruption scandal in the family and by King Juan Carlos’s elephant-killing trip to Botswana, and so is under scrutiny. But the institution – and I would go as far as to say the country as whole – is demonstrating a capacity to regenerate itself. King Felipe’s sister Cristina and her husband will go on trial next January.

The least of Spain’s problems is whether to revert to a Republic, or keep the monarchy. The Socialist Felipe González or the conservative José María Aznar, former prime ministers, would, as presidents, not be above the political fray in very partisan Spain as much as a Juan Carlos was or his son Felipe VI is proving to be. Felipe has not put a foot wrong in his first year on the throne and enjoys high approval ratings – far higher than those of any other public figure.

The most heated problem facing Spain is the issue of Catalan independence. The parties in favour of independence, an unholy alliance of conservative nationalists, radical republicans and anti-capitalists, won 48% of the vote in September’s election and 53% of the seats in the regional parliament. Hardly a clear mandate to declare a separate state.

Franco would have solved the problem, not that it could have risen in his very centralized dictatorship, by sending in the tanks. The central government is using some of the democratic weapons it has at its disposal to rein in the independence movement, such as summoning Artur Mas, the president of Catalonia, to testify in court. This seems to be turning him into a martyr.
Nothing will be done institutionally to try to satisfy the pro-independence camp until after the December election, and tinkering around with the constitution to give Catalonia more powers is not going to calm the independence hot heads.

Franco famously said that he had left his regime and its institutions ‘tied up, and well tied up.’ The knots were unravelled successfully and peacefully. One, however, has proven to be very difficult and sensitive, and that is how to openly confront Spain’s recent past, unlike, most notably and admirably, Germany. Perhaps the wounds caused by a civil war, and with the victors rubbing their triumph into the noses of the losers during the Franco regime, are the most difficult to heal and so, this argument goes, better left as they are.

There is no doubt that the so-called pact of forgetting, an unspoken agreement between left and right after Franco died to look to the future and not rake over the past, facilitated the transition to democracy.

There is still no consensus on what to do with the contentious Valley of the Fallen, which in no way can be called a site of reconciliation. It is true that the mass tombs hold the dead of both sides, around 40,000. But the Republican dead were brought there without consulting their families, and in some cases against the express wishes of relatives. Why would a Republican want to be buried in a tomb so laden with Francoist and fascist imagery?

The previous Socialist government, which passed a controversial Historical Memory Law, appointed a commission of experts in 2011 to draw up proposals for the site including removing Franco’s grave from the basilica and burying him elsewhere. The PP won the election later that year and shelved the document, on the grounds that any change needed a consensus, something which remains as elusive as ever.

The failure to agree on how to confront the past makes it difficult to find an accord over the uncertain future.

Some countries have no image (Belgium and Paraguay, for example). Spain’s image is one of the world’s strongest and oldest. Close to 30% of Japanese respondents in a survey, conducted by the think tank for whom I work, spontaneously associated the word ‘Spain’ with bulls and almost 20% with flamenco. What image conjures up Belgium? Chocolates?

For centuries the bull has been the supreme iconographic image of Spain, to the chagrin of many Spaniards desiring a more modern image not associated with the national sport of bullfighting. During the recent crisis, the international media used the bull in creative metaphors to reflect Spain’s situation. The Economist, for example, put on its cover a bull wounded by banderillas placed in pairs into the muscle on top of the bull’s shoulders, and above it the word Spain with the S falling off so it read pain.

Spain’s image dates from the 16th century with the conquistadores who forged an empire in Latin America, the Armada that set sail for England (Sir Francis Drake is a hero for the Brits and a pirate for Spaniards) and the Black Legend associated with the Inquisition of the all-pervasive Catholic Church. That image lasted through the 18th century. Spaniards were seen as intolerant, narrow minded, indolent, calculating and intensely Catholic. The pre-eminent building was the vast, austere palace-monastery of El Escorial near Madrid, with its ashen façade, from where Philip II ran the Spanish empire and which has been called an expression in stone of Catholicism. The traditional belief is that the grill-like shape of El Escorial was chosen in honor of St. Lawrence, who, in the third century AD, was martyred by being roasted to death on a grill.

The other and very different image of Spain originated in the 19th century, and is the one I am going to talk about today. This romantic image emanates from British, American and French travellers, known collectively as los curiosos impertinentes, who visited the country and wrote about it. The term curiosos impertinentes, which means the annoyingly curious, comes from one of the interpolated tales in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, about a man, Anselmo, who tests the fidelity of his wife by asking his friend Lothario to seduce her. How the term ended up being applied to travellers is a mystery. I am going to talk about eight British writers, three of whom I met – Walter Starkie, Gerald Brenan and Robert Graves – and another of whom, Michael Jacobs, was a friend for many years.

According to the stereotypes forged by this romantic image Spaniards were anarchist, individualist, tolerant, passionate, impulsive, natural, generous and pagan – the total reverse of the other image. The emblematic building was the exotic, sensual, Moorish Alhambra palace in Granada, the residence of Muslim kings until the Christian conquest of the city in 1492. All women were like Carmen, a beautiful gypsy with a fiery temper, responsible for the downfall of many men and immortalised in Bizet’s 1857 opera, which brought together all the romantic clichés of southern Spain, from banditry to gypsies and matadors. Incidentally, it is still one of the most performed operas in the world. Carmen was inspired by Prosper Merimée’s novel of the same name, which sparked the French interest in Spain. The romantic image of Spain is a variation of the West’s fascination for the orient (the East).

In the words of Michael Jacobs, who died last year: “Spain is a country continually identified and constrained by metaphors, and there are even those who have interpreted its very shape as a protruding spiritual presence thrusting out not into the Atlantic but into the mystical imagination.”

Few other countries have produced archetypal personalities of such resonance as Carmen, Don Juan and, above all, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose names are continually invoked to describe the opposing extremes of the Spanish character.

The ‘exotic’, primitive Spain was epitomised by the phrase ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’, the idea that Spain is different, not European, apparently coined by Alexandre Dumas, best known as the author of The Three Musketeers, first published in 1844.

Some of these ideas and images fed the concept of “Spanish exceptionalism”, tainted by association with Fascism in the 20th century. The notion of Spanish exceptionalism played into the hands of then dicator Franco, who won the 1936-39 Civil War, as it explained why Spaniards, unlike other Europeans, could not live in democracy: because democracy was an unSpanish and thus dangerous, foreign system.

The modern Spanish tourism industry was promoted in its first years in the 1960s during the Franco regime with the slogan, “Spain is different” (it was the only dictatorship in Western Europe apart from Portugal). All countries, of course, are different and some more than others, but we should not exaggerate it or play it up as some of the curiosos impertinentes did.

The father of the curiosos impertinentes, as far as British writers are concerned, is Richard Ford, author of the two volume Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home, published in 1845, the forerunner of today’s growth industry of travel guides, which runs to 1,064 pages of double-column closely-printed pages text, 140 journeys and a 50-page index. The original 2,000 sets costing the considerable sum for its day of 30 shillings were sold out in little more than a year. I have long coveted a copy of the first edition.

Ford, a High Tory grandee of independent means, had an opinion on everything Spanish. The scope of the book can be gauged from the sub-title: “Describing the country and cities, the natives and their manners, the antiquities, religion, legends, fine arts, literature, sports and gastronomy … with notices on Spanish history.”

Some of Ford’s comments were so caustic that the 1844 edition was suppressed. Even so, the expurgated edition is still full of comments like, Valencians are “vindictive, sullen, fickle and treacherous; in Murcia “the better classes vegetate in a monotonous unsocial existence: their pursuits are the cigar and the siesta” and Catalonia is “no place for the man of pleasure, taste or literature … here cotton is spun, vice and discontent bred, revolution concoted.” As for the Andalucian he “is the greatest boaster; he brags chiefly of his courage and wealth. He ends in believing his own lie, and hence is always pleased with himself, with whom he is on the best of terms. His redeeming qualities are his kind and good manners, his lively, social turn, his ready wit and sparkle. The provincial dress is so extremely picturesque, that it is adopted in our costumeless land for fancy balls.”

Ford travelled around Spain in the 1830s by horse, wearing gear which he recommended to adventurous travellers: a jacket of black sheepskin or lambskin, with, in his words, “a sash around the waist which sustains the loins and maintains an equable heat over the abdomen,” a cloak, and in summer “the head should be protected with a silk handkerchief tied after a turban fashion, which all the natives do, in addition we always lined the inside of our hats with thickly-doubled brown paper.”

Ford not only produced a book which in many ways has stood the test of time, with wonderful descriptions of places, bullfighting and generally perceptive remarks about Spain – apart from the insults – but he also returned to England with more than 500 sketches. Few Spanish artists had bothered to memorialise their native scene, so that the drawings and watercolours done by Ford and his wife Harriet, a selection of which were exhibited in Madrid last year, are often the only record of buildings and localities that have vanished or changed beyond recognition. He found the hams of Montanchez so delicious and the amontillado sherry that he introduced them to England.

Too much sentimental nonsense had been written about the Alhambra, the Islamic palace in Granada, he wrote, almost certainly referring to the American writer Washington Irving, whose Tales of the Alhambra had been published in 1832. To be truly appreciated the Alhambra had to be “lived in and beheld in the semi-obscure evening. The shadows of the cypresses on the walls assume the forms of the dusky Moor revisiting his last home, while the night winds breaking through the unglazed windows and the myrtles, rustle as his silken robes or sigh like his lament over the profanation of the unclean infidel and destroyer.”

One of Ford’s many acute observations was that Spain was the country of the patria chica. Patria is first and foremost place of origin – more than mother country – and chica means little and hence something to be protected. A Spaniards’ first loyalty is often to the village, town or city where he was born, a tangible place, and not to his country: these feelings are expressed in the tens of thousands of annual fiestas that still take place in villages. He called Spain a “bundle of local units tied together by a rope of sand.” Judging by the push for independence in Catalonia, the ‘rope’ is not much stronger today.

Ford was so taken by Spain that when he returned to England and moved into Heavitree House, a rambling Elizabethan farmhouse, near Exeter he had the buildings decorated in a Spanish manner, and sent for pines and cypresses from Spain to plant in the garden and built a summer house in the Moorish style. The cornice of his bathroom was taken from the Casa Sánchez in the grounds of the Alhambra. He died in 1858 and on his tombstone was fittingly inscribed in Latin the following, Rerum Hispaniae indagator acerrimus, “Arden researcher on Hispanic matters,”

Ford was largely responsible for the publication of The Bible in Spain in 1842 by George Borrow, our next curioso impertinente. While Ford was writing The Handbook, his publisher John Murray sent him Borrow’s manuscript and he urged Murray to publish it.

George Borrow peddled and printed in Spain the Protestant Bible for the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804. He spoke several languages including Russian, and his first job as an agent for the Society was in St. Petersburg, followed by Spain which was suffering the aftermath of the ruinous Napoleonic wars and in the throes of the Carlist War.

Mounted on his thoroughbred Arab horse, Sidi Habismilk, Borrow, known as Don Jorgito el Inglés, saw himself as a knight-errant of the Bible.

Borrow called Spain “the most magnificent country in the world, probably the most fertile, and certainly with the finest climate. Whether her children are worthy of their mother is another question, which I shall not attempt to answer, but content myself with observing that, amongst much that is lamentable and reprehensible, I have found much that is noble and to be admired; much stern heroic virtue, at least amongst the great body of the Spanish nation, with which my mission lay.”

He got into many scrapes with the Catholic authorities who hounded him and at one stage imprisoned him. The Bibles were seized wherever found, and those sent from Madrid impounded at the custom house where all goods went so that a duty could be levied on them. Borrow’s reporting of such acts reinforced Spain’s image of religious intolerance at the official level, though not among the people. Not surprisingly, Borrow had hardly a kind word for the Catholic Church as an institution.

Ford’s Handbook and Borrow’s The Bible in Spain were bestsellers and went into many editions. They did much to fuel Spain’s tourist boom in the 19th century by Brits. As Ford wrote, “Though a land of adventures and romance full of historic, poetic and legendary association, (Spain) yet is withal a kind of terra incognita where the all-wandering foot of the all-pervading Englishman but seldom rambles. The beef-steak and the tea-kettle which infallibly mark the progress of John Bull are as yet unknown”.

The steady extension of the railway through Spain, particularly in Andalusia, facilitated tourism – a mode of transport detested by Ford and by his hero, the first Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and of the Peninsular War (which Spaniards call the War of Independence). The Iron Duke, who gave Ford financial support, had complained that the railway would “encourage the lower classes to move about.”

While Borrow travelled with copies of the Bible, Walter Starkie, born in 1894 near Dublin, took his violin with him when he travelled through Spain in the 1920s and 30s and was something of a wandering minstrel. He was a gifted musician and linguist, and regarded his violin as the equivalent of Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. While walking Starkie, as recounted in his book Spanish Raggle-Taggle, published in 1934, would converse with himself. Often he would enact a conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, telling himself: “Get thee behind me, pot-bellied Sancho, the true vagabond is no hiker who has visited Woolworth’s”. Starkie’s life was something of a tussle between the practical Sancho Panza part of his nature and the idealistic wandering Don Quixote side.

Starkie is hyper romantic in lamenting the passing of the “old” Spain. He had the Irish gift of the gab. Many of the conversations and stories in the book are difficult to believe, as is his claim that he retrieved from the waiting room of a railway station an umbrella he had left there many years before.

Starkie later became the first cultural representative in Madrid of the British Council (1940-54), an institution that played a part in keeping the Franco regime out of belligerent involvement in the Second World War on Hitler’s side. Starkie’s eccentricity was also a good cover for his work as a British agent. His flat in Madrid was used by the British Embassy as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees en route to Gibraltar and Lisbon.

Victor Sawdon Pritchett, born in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1900, was also walking through Spain at the same time as Starkie, but their paths did not cross. Pritchett first came to Spain in 1924 as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, a US newspaper, and in 1926 walked through Extremadura. The journey is described in Marching Spain, published in 1928, a book Pritchett, best known for his short stories, later disowned and was happy to see go out of print until 1988, eight years before he died. Pritchett began that journey by arriving by boat in La Coruña from Southampton and then getting to Badajoz via Lisbon where he begins his journey. As the boat arrives he sees the Spanish flag in the harbour flying at half mast. He wondered what great personage had died:

“Perhaps a prime minister, an archbishop, a public man of sorts, even one of Spain’s 800 generals. It was clearly an occasion of official mourning, and no people love death as the Spaniards love it. They enjoy the evidence of death. They love the sight of a good, bloody corpse, well gashed and bruised – who can forget the revolting realism of the agonised Christs of their galleries and processions? The curious Pritchett asked a policeman who had died. “He turned on me, and his eyes were musingly half-closed like a cat’s. “It is out Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. I remembered then that it was Good Friday”.

Religion comes into his journey quite a lot: there is Don Benito with his illicit copy of the Book of Genesis and the Scottish Protestant missionary, who had been roughed up by the civil guard for for proselytising and whose house is known as the House of Ill Fame. Marching Spain is full of encounters with people, with what Pritchett calls “human architecture”, which he preferred over buildings. He rarely described a building during his wanderings.

It is not long before Pritchett encounters olive oil, and for him it becomes the smell of Spain.

“Each country has its smell: Spain reeks of rank olive oil. The fumes of that oil, which is used by the peasants for lighting their fires, for burning in their lamps, and for cooking their food, hit out from every doorway with a blow that at first sickened. I struggled for two days with the stink, and then it conquered me, sank into me, and permeated my system, gripped my limbs, possessed my palate, pervaded my nose – in fact, behaved like a Spanish stare so that henceforth I noticed it no more – and ate it unknowingly – the abominable stuff.”

The Spanish Temper, published in 1954, 26 years after Marching Spain, is not a travel book in the sense that we follow Pritchett on the road, although it reads like one, but a distillation of his study of Spain and his thoughts and experiences about the country.

Spain had changed by the early 1950s when Pritchett goes back. Franco had been dictator more than 10 years. Many of Pritchett’s friends and contacts had gone into exile after the Civil War. He notes early on in the Spanish Temper that:

“Spain is the great producer of exiles, a country unable to tolerate its own people. The Moors, the Jews, the Protestants, the reformers – out with them; and out, at different periods, with the liberals, the atheists, the priests, the kings, the presidents, the generals, the socialists, the anarchists, fascists, and communists; out with the Right, out with the Left, out with every government. The fact recalls the cruel roar of abuse that goes up in the ring when the bullfighter misses a trick; out with him.”

Recalling an incident during his travels in Marching Spain when Pritchett mentioned Málaga and Seville in the same breadth, in the presence of a young man from Málaga who passionately denounces Seville as much inferior, Pritchett muses in The Spanish Temper that the “provinciality of the Spaniard is his true ground and passion, His town is not like any other town. It is the only town. And he too is not like any other human being; he is indeed the only human being.” Richard Ford made a similar point 90 years earlier.
Pritchett’s observations on the complexities and contradictions of Spanish life including the intensity of regional differences remain pertinent today. At one point he says “there is no such country as Spain.” His description of the streets lying off the Puerta del Sol in Madrid after midnight could apply to many towns and cities today.

“They are streets of small bars crowded with men roaring away at each other, drinking their small glasses of beer or wine, tearing shellfish to bits and scattering their refuse and the sugar-papers of their coffee on the floors. The walls are toiled and in gaudy colours. The head of a bull will hang there, or some bloody painting of a scene at the bullfight.”

The main difference between then and now is that women and not only men would be roaring away at one another.

Pritchett’s great friend Gerald Brenan, whom he first met in 1936, also went back to Spain after the Civil War and wrote about the country. Brenan, unlike Pritchett, had made it his home after the First World War in 1919 and left Spain in 1936. Regretting he had not gone to university because of the war, Brenan used the bounty given him as an officer when he was demobbed to buy a library of 2,000 books and had them shipped to the village of Yegen in the Alpujarra near Granada where he immersed himself in educating himself. Like his contemporary the poet and novelist Robert Graves, best known among other books for his autobiography Goodbye to All That, which describes his bitter leave-taking of England following the cataclysm of the First World War, one reason for Brenan choosing to live in Spain was his calculation that his small income would go further there. Graves’s “All that” included the constrictions of a public school education, the class system and British philistinism. Graves moved to Mallorca in 1929 and died there in 1985, but hardly wrote about Spain except Majorca Observed published in 1965.

Brenan returned to Spain in 1949 and recounted what he saw in The Face of Spain, published in 1950. By then he had made his name as an authority on the country with The Spanish Labyrinth, still one of the seminal books for understanding what led to that savage conflict.

The Face of Spain is written in the form of a diary.

“The impression that abides from my visit is of how little, after all the vicissitudes of the last 13 years, the character of the people has changed and this, to anyone who knew Spain before the Civil War, will be the best recommendation,” Brenan wrote in The Face of Spain. “To those who did not, let me say that there is something about this country and its way of life which makes a unique impression. For centuries a mixing bowl of the cultures of Europe, Asia and North Africa, Spain gives off a note which is unlike any other. A sharp, penetrating, agridulce strain, both harsh and nostalgic like that of its guitar music, which no one who has once heard will ever forget”.

Brenan vividly describes what he encounters 10 years after the Civil War: severe poverty, deprivation, corruption, black market, the suffocating political atmosphere of the dictatorship and the village of Yegen where his home had remained intact. The picture that emerges is a depressing one. Nevertheless, Spain continued to attract him, and he returned for good in 1953, despite being openly critical of the regime. As he expressed it:

“The Englishman, fresh from the dull hurry of London streets and from their sea of pudding faces – faces which often seem to have known no greater grief than that of having arrived too late in the chocolate or cake queue – feels recharged and revitalised when he bathes in this river.”

By river, he meant Spain.

Brenan’s next book South from Granada recounts his life in Yegen in the 1920s. It is an intimate, insider portrait of life in a village that had changed little over the centuries. The writer Bruce Chatwin visited the village in 1987, almost 70 years after Brenan moved there, and said it reminded him of Afghanistan. The analogy was apt. To appreciate what Brenan did in the 1920s you must imagine that a young Englishman had decided today to go and settle in a remote village in Afghanistan 4,000 feet above sea level, like Yegen, with 2,000 books. The nearest town of any significance to Yegen was Almeria which until the 1960s was more accessible by sea than by land.

To say that Brenan was an object of curiosity in Yegen is to put it mildly. Encouraged to go to church by the local priest, despite declaring himself Protestant, Brenan was given pride of place in the bishop’s chair in full view of the congregation.

Norman Lewis, slightly younger than Pritchett and Brenan, set out in 1934 with his brother-in-law to reach Spain through France by taking with them a collapsible canoe, but they did not get very far and abandoned it. The canoe and baggage weighed more than 100 kilos and was transported on a small cart. They spent more time carrying the canoe than paddling it. Lewis was also escaping Graves’s “all that”. In his first volume of autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, Lewis describes his lower middle-class suburban London background as “an endless, low-quality dream… nothing, with chips”.

Lewis’s Spanish Adventure, published in 1935, recounts their journey through pre-Civil War Spain including the armed revolt by Asturian miners. At one point when they arrived in Madrid by train they were caught in shooting between snipers and soldiers.

Lewis was particularly struck by the singularity of Spain’s landscape. As he later wrote:

“Its surprising combinations of desert, forest and mountains contain an element of the fantastic that is lacking in any other part of Europe. Only Spain can supply the profound and exciting sense of personal incongruity which is engendered by finding oneself in a boundless plain of billowing rock, from which all colour has been purged by the sun, leaving a panorama empty of everything but whiteness of cloud and rock and the blue of the sky. Against such terrestrial purity one is demoted to the status of a stain.”

Like Brenan, Lewis lived in a Spanish village on and off for a couple of years in the early 1950s after serving in the Army overseas and wrote about it in Voices of the Old Sea, published in 1984.

Lewis lived in the remote fishing village of Farol in Catalonia, in the last period before Spain was opened up to mass tourism. He became a fishermen, which enabled him to integrate into the village. He had a keen eye for the absurd. The village’s muleteer had trained his mule to deposit its manure only at the door of the inn, for which he received a glass of wine twice a day.

I will end with my friend Michael Jacobs, once dubbed “the George Borrow of the high-speed train era” by the conservative Spanish daily ABC. Michael left behind a substantial body of work on Spain. His Between Hopes and Memories, published in 1994, is a highly original and erudite departure from the 20th century travel writers whom he said “lamented the modern Spain and regretted the passing of rural life”. He called such sentimentality offensive. Laurie Lee, whose As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, is the most poetic account of Spain, and Jan Morris are the best-known such authors. Indeed Michael’s remark in his book on Andalusia, published in 1991, that Jan Morris, formerly James Morris, found poverty “pictureseque” provoked a furious letter from her. As Michael told me: “She wrote saying there was a kind of beauty in the closeness of peasants to the soil, which only proved what I said.” Despite the clash, Morris chose his book as one of her 10 favourite books on Spain, calling it an “antidote to sloppy romanticism.”

Perhaps because of his academic training as an art historian – he received a doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and was the last postgraduate student of Anthony Blunt, the former curator of the royal art collection who was publicly exposed as a spy in 1978 – Michael took a more all-encompassing approach to his travels around Spain. He digresses on food (one of his great passions and he found the Spaniards more obsessed than the French or Italians) and writes knowledgeably on art and literature.

In his book Between Hopes and Memories Michael looks at the unusual and eccentric aspects of Spain, often contrasting what he found with how it had been described by previous writers.

He explores the less-publicised aspects of Spain, concluding that if he had to choose one characteristic common to the many fragments that make up Spain, it would be neither “profound permanence” nor ”Moorish sensuality”, – the two opposing images I mentioned at the start of this talk – but something Spaniards refer to as cursi. This word carries a wide range of nuances: flashy, genteel, affected, kitsch, quaint and cheesy. He was interested in a Spain that contradicted and even parodied romantic images of Spanishness, an ephemeral and anarchic Spain of discothèques, pollution, unpublished poets, architectural tack, gastronomic passions, historical shams and fantastical bad taste. He could have called his book Unromantic Spain, but that title had already been used by Mario Praz in 1929.

Most of us would find not being able to drive a handicap. Michael regarded it as an advantage for the modern-day travel writer. As he told me:

“It forces you to take public transport where you talk to more people. And more importantly if you arrive at some God-forsaken village in a car you can always drive on, but if you get there by the last bus or train you have no option but to seek out the nearest fonda, which is an experience that fewer and fewer people have these days. So much of tourism in Spain today involves carefully-planned journeys and paradors in the attractive towns while those of greater interest are ignored.”

The lack of his own transport and the scarcity of public transport in some of the remote places he visited led him into some strange travelling experiences, such as touring Huelva in the back of a van belonging to a rock-flamenco group called Dulce Venganza (Sweet Revenge) and travelling in La Mancha, on the trail of Don Quixote, with a photographer obsessed with dead dogs.

I drove Michael to see Camilo José Cela, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1989, and then left him to follow the same path as that pursued by Cela on foot in his book Journey to the Alcarria, published in 1948. Our meeting with Cela is amusingly recounted in the Hopes and Memories book. Michael visited the same places as Cela, and he discovered that the great writer‘s celebrated book was not liked.

“Cela would just spend a night in a village, go into a shop or bar, meet up with the village idiot or some deformed unfortunate, and – there you have it, the whole village summed up,” the son of the gardener who showed Cela around Brihuega in 1946 complained.

When Michael visits the Alhambra in Granada, about which he wrote a book published in 2000 with superb photos, he finds romantic attitudes to the palace no less prevalent than they were in Richard Ford’s day.

“A continuing fascination with gypsies, meanwhile,” he wrote, “has led to coach outings to ‘gypsy caves’, where tourists watch a sorry display of flamenco and drink an insipid glass of sangría. To complete the whole ‘romantic experience’ there is the obligatory evening trudge to the Albaicín church of San Nicolás, where row on row of video cameras wait poised to catch the setting sun as it suffuses the Alhambra’s russet-red turrets with a golden glow, a performance that sometimes inspires a spontaneous round of applause.”

Like Norman Lewis, Michael also lived in a Spanish village. He bought a house in Frailes in the province of Jaén and spent part of the year there. His experiences in this strange place – which my wife and I stayed in – are recounted in The Factory of Light, published in 2003, appropriately by John Murray, the publisher responsible for Richard Ford’s Handbook.

When he died in 2014, Michael left an uncompleted book he was writing on Diego Velázquez’s enigmatic masterpiece Las Meninas which hangs in the Prado museum in Madrid and whose mirror game of truth and illusion had fascinated Michael ever since he first saw the painting as a schoolboy. The book, Everything is Happening, was published earlier this year with an introduction and coda by his friend Ed Vulliamy. There are many interpretations of the painting’s ultimate significance. Michael follows the trails of associations from each individual character in the picture, as well as his own memories of and relationship to the extraordinary work, concluding that part of its greatness lies in there being no ‘definitive’ interpretation.

I am sure he would have agreed with me that the same can be said for Spain, which is what made the country so fascinating and beguiling for los curiosos impertinentes and for both of us.
 

Books used and cited

Richard Ford, Handbook for Travellers in Spain (Centaur Press, 3 vols, 1966).
George Borrow, The Bible in Spain (Everyman, 1969).
Walter Starkie, Spanish Raggle-Taggle (Murray, 1934).
V.S. Pritchett, Marching Spain (Ernest Benn, 1928), The Spanish Temper (Knopf, 1954).
Jeremy Treglown, V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life (Pimlico, 2005).
Robert Graves, Majorca Observed (Cassell, 1965).
Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge University Press, 1943), The Face of Spain (Turnstile Press, 1950), South from Granada (Readers Union-Hamish Hamilton, 1958).
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Interior Castle: A Life of Gerald Brenan (Sinclair-Stevenson 1992).
Norman Lewis, Spanish Adventure (Holt, 1935), Voices of the Old Sea (Hamilton, 1984), The Tomb in Seville (Cape, 2003).
Julian Evans, Semi Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis (Cape, 2008).
Michael Jacobs, Between Hopes and Memories (Picador, 1994),
The Factory of Light (John Murray, 2003).
Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting (Granta, 2015).

Turquía tiene poco que celebrar este mes cuando cumple 10 años de negociaciones para su adhesión a la Unión Europea. Únicamente se han abierto 14 de los 35 capítulos del acervo comunitario (el último, en noviembre de 2013), y solo uno se ha cerrado provisionalmente. La mayor parte de los capítulos restantes están congelados por la Unión Europea desde 2006 debido a que Ankara no ha ampliado su unión aduanera con la UE y no ha abierto sus puertos y aeropuertos al tráfico greco-chipriota, o por Francia o Chipre unilateralmente. Ankara no está dispuesta a ceder a menos que Bruselas cumpla la promesa de poner fin al aislamiento de la República Turca del Norte de Chipre (RTNC), creada tras la invasión de la República de Chipre por Turquía en 1974 y no reconocida internacionalmente. Y eso no puede pasar, ya que el Gobierno grecochipriota ha bloqueado el reglamento sobre el comercio directo necesario para levantar los aranceles sobre los productos de la RTNC.

El proceso de adhesión está en el limbo. Mientras tanto, el alto el fuego entre el Estado turco y el insurgente Partido de los Trabajadores del Kurdistán (PKK, clasificado como grupo terrorista por la Unión Europea y Estados Unidos), tras una brutal guerra sucia de 28 años en la que han muerto como mínimo 40.000 personas, se rompió en julio con un recrudecimiento de la violencia por ambos bandos. Al mismo tiempo, dando un giro de 180 grados, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, presidente autocrático del país, se ha sumado a Washington en la lucha contra el Estado Islámico (EI) y ha lanzado ataques aéreos contra el PKK a pesar de que el grupo separatista y sus aliados en Siria han desempeñado un papel crucial a la hora de contener el avance del EI. Actualmente, el ambiente en Turquía recuerda al del periodo de dominio militar de la década de 1990, en pleno apogeo de la guerra contra el PKK, cuando el encarcelamiento de líderes kurdos era algo rutinario.

El problema kurdo lo tiene que resolver Turquía por sí misma. Sin embargo, el punto muerto con la UE se podría mitigar si esta abriese los dos capítulos sobre derechos jurídicos y fundamentales y sobre justicia, seguridad y libertades bloqueados por Chipre desde 2009. En cierto modo, es una hipocresía que los países de la UE critiquen –y con razón– las importantes deficiencias de Turquía en cuanto al sistema de derecho y el respeto a las libertades fundamentales –el meollo del proceso de negociación– y no le den la oportunidad de corregirlas abriendo esos capítulos, lo cual también permitiría a Bruselas recuperar algo de la ventaja perdida. Además, es bastante absurdo que, en este asunto, la Unión Europea esté obligada con un solo país, pero esas son las normas si se exige unanimidad, dado que se necesita unanimidad para abrir los capítulos.

La democracia turca es profundamente imperfecta. El Partido de la Justicia y el Desarrollo (AKP) en el Gobierno –cuyas raíces se encuentran en el islam político y que ocupa el poder desde 2002– ha neutralizado al poderoso Ejército, pero desde 2013 la prensa turca ha sido calificada de “no libre” por Freedom House, la corrupción se ha agravado, el umbral del 10% de los votos necesario para obtener representación parlamentaria no es democrático (en España es del 3%), y el poder judicial sigue politizado. En el último índice de 175 países elaborado por Transparencia Internacional, el nivel percibido de corrupción de Turquía fue el que más se había deteriorado, si bien sigue mejor clasificada que Italia y que dos países de la Unión Europea como Bulgaria y Rumanía.

En su primer año como presidente (después de 11 años como primer ministro), Erdogan, amparándose en una ley de injurias al presidente, ha demandado a más personas que las que fueron juzgadas en los 64 años anteriores en virtud de una tristemente célebre ley contra las críticas a Mustafá Kemal Atatürk, fundador de la República de Turquía. Mientras que Suleimán Demirel, presidente entre 1993 y 2000, hacía caso omiso de las caricaturas y los comentarios mordaces contra él (los coleccionaba con orgullo), los abogados de Erdogan tienen instrucciones de perseguir a quienquiera que lo critique (generalmente, en Twitter).

Turquía acudirá a las urnas el 1 de noviembre, ya que de las elecciones del pasado junio no pudo salir un gobierno. El partido AKP perdió su mayoría absoluta debido en gran parte al éxito del prokurdo Partido Democrático de los Pueblos (HDP) y no logró formar una coalición ni un gobierno en minoría. Con la demonización del HDP, Erdogan espera recuperar votos suficientes para dar al AKP los escaños parlamentarios que le permitan reformar la Constitución y crear un régimen presidencialista. La Unión Europea debería estar a la altura del reto y encontrar una vía para abrir esos dos capítulos clave.

http://www.abc.es/fotonoticias/fotos-opinion/20151006/william-chislett-investigador-asociado-1622142881264.html

My 2014 speech at the Cervantes Institute, London, now published in the International Journal of Iberian Studies.
http://www.williamchislett.com/2014/09/is-spain-different-the-political-economic-and-social-consequences-of-its-crisis/
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=140/

HABSBURG Spain in the 16th century was the world’s first global superpower, with an empire stretching east across most of Europe to the Philippines and India and west across the Atlantic to the Americas. It was an age of expansion and cultural efflorescence and ended with Spain’s steep decline from which it never fully recovered.

Robert Goodwin’s new book begins with the arrival in Seville in 1519 of the Santa María, the first ship to reach Europe from the newly conquered coast of Mexico, laden with such riches that “there was no other ballast than gold”, and ends in 1682 with Juan Valdés Leal’s gruesome painting “In Ictu Oculi” (“In the Twinkling of an Eye”), an allegory of death—and for the author a perfect symbol for the “end times” of Spanish imperialism.

Mr Goodwin, a research fellow at University College London, has mined deep in the archives and produced a wealth of wonderfully evocative and offbeat detail that is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. The most coveted office in the monarchy’s Privy Chamber was Groom of the Stool, who attended on the king’s defecation and looked after the royal chamber pot. The physical closeness naturally led this most intimate of courtiers to become someone in whom much confidence was placed and with whom many royal secrets were shared.

The author’s cast of protagonists during this Counter-Reformation period when costly wars were waged against Protestant heretic enemies, most notably the Dutch, includes the chronically ill mystic St Teresa of Avila, who believed that every time she heard a thunderclap God was communicating with her soul, and Sister María de Ágreda, the closest confidante of Felipe IV, who claimed to be in two places at the same time (evangelising Indians while she was asleep). The Inquisition’s torturers forced a strip of linen down a suspected heretic’s throat, held the victim’s mouth open by an iron plug and poured water slowly, causing a sensation of suffocation. The method was later abandoned in favour of more “merciful” treatment. Waterboarding was a scandal long before it came to the fore in the administration of George W. Bush.

In the most fascinating section, Mr Goodwin explores the paradox of a possible correlation between the artistic and literary splendours of the Golden Age and political decadence. As well as the imperial victories recorded in magnificent paintings, including Diego Velázquez’s “The Surrender of Breda” and Titian’s “Equestrian Portrait of Charles V” (pictured), there were the dark monk paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán, the plays of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, the poetry of Góngora and the sacred made real in the lifelike images of Christ, carved in wood, for Holy Week processions in Seville, which today are a tourist attraction.

Mr Goodwin cleverly weaves into his own narrative the social observations in “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as the father of the modern novel. Don Quixote’s enthusiasm for the heroics of the romances of chivalry mirrors the great exploits of the Spanish in Europe and the New World, whereas his gradual disillusionment in the second part of the book could reflect a sense of decline.

Like Cervantes’s hero, Spain’s elite had become deluded and had lost touch with reality. By the end of the 17th century the empire had become overstretched on almost every front, while the vast quantities of precious metals pouring into Spain caused massive inflation. The fall in the value of these riches led to unpopular increases in taxation and massive borrowing to sustain the empire. The English and the Dutch were taking over; the new spur to globalisation was inter-imperial rivalry.
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21659690-highly-readable-account-birth-first-global-superpower-global-power