what matters to Spaniards above all else is not an ideal or a belief. It is no longer God or Spain, but the family.

the main reason is that Spanish women have been taking up full-time employment without significant changes in the division of domestic work between the sexes. As has been seen in other countries in southern Europe, women who do not wish to give up their jobs and cannot spread the burden of domestic tasks react by cutting down, or cutting out, their

women in Spain have reacted to discrimination by carving out niches for themselves within the labour market. It is reminiscent of the way the Jews turned to certain trades when they were forbidden to bear arms or own land in parts of medieval Europe. The favoured areas are health, education and the law.

Under the Church’s guidance, censorship attained extraordinary heights of puritanism. Professional boxing matches were kept out of newsreels on the grounds that they showed naked male torsos. Photographs of the bouts did appear in the press, but with vests painted in by the retocadores (retouchers) who were employed by every newspaper and magazine

The resort to prostitution is more indicative of repression in society than liberation.

A survey by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) in 2004 found that 27 per cent of the men it interviewed, who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine, acknowledged having had sex with a prostitute. This was by far the highest figure in any European country. One in fourteen Spanish males said he had visited a prostitute in the

You do not expect, but you may well find, especially if you live in Spain, that someone you work alongside, or over, or under, does not go home at night to a family, or a partner, or flatmates, but to a community in which there are lengthy periods of silence; that for two hours each day he or she is wearing a cilicio, a chain with pointed links

When, for example, a Spaniard wants to convey the idea that something or somebody is reliable, trustworthy, ‘OK’ in the widest sense, he or she will say that that person or thing ‘va a misa’ (‘goes to Mass’).

The Bishops’ Conference owns a 50 per cent stake in one of the country’s main radio networks, Cadena Cope, and one Spanish child in every seven goes to a school owned by a religious order or association. Most importantly of all, perhaps, the Church oversees religious education in all of Spain’s schools, including even those it does not own.