Where have all the Spaniards gone?



Back to the Home Page


Part 2 - 1985-1989: Fast Forward to the Future

Chapter 37: After Franco
Things have changed. Fifteen years have gone by. Franco is dead. The regime has changed beyond all recognition. In 1964 there were the quiet celebrations: 25 years of peace. The new direction was supposed to be towards 25 years of prosperity. By 1989 Spain would be up there with the rest of Europe.

Spain used to be a strange country. Was it part of Africa? Was it just some odd amalgam of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East all jumbled up and totally neurotic?

Once upon a time it was a wonderful mixture of European Christians, African and middle eastern moslems, and Middle eastern Jews. Then along came their catholic majesties, who were anything but catholic. They threw out the moslems. They threw out the Jews. They decimated the culture. They turned a wonderful open society into an inward-looking frightened nation. They smashed a thriving culture, and left only a dark, frightening religion. Industry and agriculture were thriving. When the moslems and the jews left, industry fell into decay. The fields started to turn barren as the waterways were lost. The terraces started to crumble, and each man tilled his own small patch to feed his family and tried to stay alive. For five hundred years the only important thing for the multitude of Spaniards was to try and stay alive.

From 1964 there was to be a concerted effort to lift the nation out of poverty. There was to be a gradual easing of supervision by the state. The Guardia were told to take a step back. The church was encouraged to embrace the reforms coming from Rome. The people were supported, first by the unions, and then by inward investment.

The investment had started in the industrial north, in Catalonia and the Basque country. The unions had begun to invest in the south, by buying up land by the sea, and building apartments for their members to use on vacations. Foreigners were also buying up the land. There was a massive regeneration of the cities, and the building of factories.

In the fifties Spain was still a silent, morose culture, deeply repressed, filled with demons. The people were frightened of the state in its many forms. They were frightened of the government, they were frightened of the church. They were frightened of the Guardia. They were not so frightened of the army because the army consisted mainly of young country boys who were too frightened to be a threat to anyone.

But towards the end of the decade everything changed. The rich started buying refrigerators from America. Bars started buying televisions. The small investments by the unions from the north and the foreigners along Andalusia's coast began to produce wealth. Over the course of a decade there started to grow a middle class, something which Spain had not seen since the Middle Ages.

There started to be light and fun again in the country. With the rise of television at least those in the cities could begin to see the outside world. In the country there was generally no electricity and so there were no televisions. With the rise of the t.v. came the entertainers to make people laugh and to give people the chance to dream again. Even for the young girls, that terribly repressed group of Spanish society, there was the chance to dream with Marisol. Then there was Rafael, the Spanish Elvis. He was quickly followed by Los Brincos, the Spanish Beatles.

Along the coasts Swedish girls took off their clothes to sunbathe, and the boys didn't know what to do. It wasn't long before the Spanish girls went out and bought short skirts. And by the end of the sixties Spain was turning into a European country, and Franco was getting old and ill.

It wasn't until the eighties that I suddenly started looking back at Spain, and wondering why I had left the country for so long. Why hadn't I bought a home and settled there?

Back in 1972 I bought an apartment in a new health farm that was being developed just behind King Fahad's palace in Marbella. It cost me £11,000. But I never stayed there.

Marbella had changed beyond belief since I first walked thru the tiny village ten years earlier. There was the fishing village with four bars, and a jumble of fishermen's cottages. Up the road were half a dozen big flashy hotels, and a couple of small developments of villas and apartments. The village was full of bustle. The new apartments were largely empty and silent.

Now the place was a proper town, with buildings and people everywhere. On every side were cranes and new developments. The roads were chaos. I tried to find the bar where our hitch-hiking Geordie friend had had a fight with Brian Jones, but couldn't recognize anything. There were no bars with photos of that herculean fight. Yet that had only been five years earlier.

I drove right up thru Spain, and everywhere I went was the same story; cranes and bulldozers. New developments were everywhere. I started taking photographs, and planned a book on Spain. It was to be called The Cranes in Spain.

The journey was so different from that journey I had made with Annabel only six years before, when we had driven the length of Spain on a trip to Morocco.

But this time I didn't stay. I was busy earning a living in the UK. I didn't have time for bumming around Spain. I bought the Marbella apartment and left. I had mixed feelings about it. This was Spain. I was a capitalist. Spain was the place for bums with no money and no particular place to go. Or was it? Being a capitalist was frowned on in Spain. The word 'capitalista' was an insult. Yet here I was standing in the middle of a development site, the very picture of a capitalist.

I went back to the UK. In a cafe in East London I did the deal. The exchange controls still in existence made moving sterling out of the country difficult. I met the vendor. He was buying into a deal in London. I was buying into a deal in Marbella. I signed his piece of paper. He signed my piece of paper. He had bought an apartment in Spain. I had bought a unit in a London development. Then the lawyer gave each of us two more pieces of paper which we signed. I signed over my purchase to the other fellow, and he signed over his purchase to me. And the deal was done, and there were no exchange controls to interrupt the deal.

It was only five years later when there was a mega property crash in Spain that, under the terms of the contract he had to buy back the apartment for a 40% uplift, that we met again in a lawyers' office in London. I collected my money, and he just sat there looking blank, close to tears. It's a hard life in the property business.

I didn't go back to Spain until the early eighties. This time I was looking for a place in the country. I wanted a new home. I wanted to settle down and live in Spain.
.... to be continued