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

Throughout much of Spanish history, then, Roman Catholicism has been not so much a religion as the religion.

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

In December 1946 the newly created United Nations passed a resolution recommending a trade boycott of Spain.

Spain’s continuing ‘invertebration’ may be one reason why it has proved so easy to change. The authorities have not had to contend with the normal array of well-organized interest groups which in other countries might have questioned and obstructed their reforms.

It has become customary to talk of Spain’s ‘peaceful transition’ from dictatorship to democracy, as if peacefulness were its defining characteristic. It was not. Politically motivated violence took the lives of more than twenty people between Franco’s death in November 1975 and the first democratic general election in July 1977. The toll later rose

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

foreigners can often see more clearly than Spaniards what it is about Spain that is distinctive. And they know, or sense, that many of its distinguishing traits are the result of its having been ruled by one man, not for five or ten or even twenty years, but for thirty-six. Franco’s signature can still be read all over the country he ruled.

Many people are ready to accept that Spain is among the largest countries in Europe, but few would think of it as one of the highest. Yet the average height of the ground is greater than in any European country except Switzerland.