No society remains still for ever. Spaniards love to criticize their own country but have lived in peace and with previously unimaginable levels of prosperity for half a century. Fundamental disagreements remain, and there is still no accepted national narrative, but they are not set on destroying those gains.

Twenty-three of the thirty-three most densely populated square kilometres in Europe are in Spain, in major cities like Barcelona and Madrid.

the Catalan confrontation revealed a mature democracy, though badly in need of fine-tuning. Nothing broke. Yet the 1978 constitution that gave Spaniards freedom, prosperity and membership of the European democracies club clearly needed updating.

the desire for independence in both Catalonia and the Basque Country will never disappear completely. It could still, indeed, reappear with even greater strength in the future.

The novelist Juan Benet recalled officials in González’s Moncloa Palace offices claiming that corruption was a necessary evil. ‘Corruption is the oil of the system. It lubricates the wheels so that they turn smoothly and do not screech. It is only necessary to make sure that it does not go beyond a certain level,’

Women gained so much in so little time, indeed, that they skipped some key battles, leaving them in charge of the home and subject to rampant machismo in their new jobs. ‘Spain has leapt from pre-feminism into post-feminism without having really experienced the feminist upheaval which elsewhere took place in between,’ the Guardian correspondent

In an attempt to belittle their southern neighbours, nineteenth-century French commentators had claimed that ‘Africa starts at the Pyrenees’, and Spaniards fretted that this still summed up Europe’s view of their country.

After four decades of dictatorship, Spain transformed itself into a democracy in just four years.

The most difficult sticking points were the demands for autonomy from regions like the Basque Country and Catalonia – reflecting the origins of Spain as a collection of nations. A country which had spent four decades declaring itself to be ‘One, Great and Free’ found itself incapable of recognizing them as ‘nations’ in their own right. Instead, a