Spain

Being sanctimonious about foreigners and their cruelty to animals has long been a British tradition. The taste for dog meat in parts of Asia seems to incense many who perhaps should have matters closer to home to worry about – such as our collective addiction to cheap, factory farmed meat. When I was a child in the 1980s, ghoulish Spanish practices usually involving donkeys at some out of the way fiesta were a mainstay of Esther Rantzen’s unfathomably popular Sunday night programme, That’s Life. But sentimentality about animals has a way of catching on: South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in has suggested banning the consumption of dog meat and Spain is

There are hundreds of mass graves dotted around the Spanish countryside. In roadside ditches, down hillside gullies, dumped in pits and down disused wells lie thousands of bodies: civilians murdered in cold blood by Franco’s death squads during the civil war that convulsed Spain between 1936 and 1939. Over the nearly forty years of Franco’s dictatorship, few spoke of what had happened during the war; silence and selective amnesia were safer. And even when Franco died in 1975, the overriding priority was the transition to democracy. The old Francoist establishment indicated that it would make way for the new era — provided that there was no digging up of the

In one of his adventures on the highways of 17th-century Spain, Don Quixote encounters a gang of prisoners ‘manacled and strung together by the neck, like beads, on a great iron chain’. Undeterred by Sancho’s protestations that these are criminals on their way to serve as galley slaves in just punishment for their crimes, Don Quixote, declaring that it is his duty as a knight errant to provide ‘succour for the wretched’, fights off the guards and frees them. In something of the same spirit, Spain’s prime minister has just announced a pardon for Catalan separatist leaders. Nine politicians, serving sentences of up to 13 years for offences including sedition,

In Tuesday’s regional elections in Madrid, the right-wing Partido Popular emerged as by far the most successful party, more than doubling its representation to win 65 of the 136 seats in the assembly. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the 42-year-old local Partido Popular leader who was seeking re-election, won more seats than the three left-wing parties combined. Vox (13 seats), the most right-wing party on the Spanish political spectrum, has already promised Ayuso the support she needs in order to govern. Despite not quite delivering an outright majority, Ayuso’s bold decision to call the snap election has clearly paid off. Her slogan of ‘Libertad’ (Liberty), her attacks on the way Spain’s socialist

The European Parliament is always eager to lecture the world about human rights. To a degree, this annoys the world’s despots and we should, of course, never underestimate how ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. But the Parliament’s overall influence on foreign affairs is still limited. On Tuesday, however, MEPs received an opportunity to actually make a difference when it came to protecting human rights. The European Parliament had to decide whether to lift the immunity of three Catalan nationalist MEPs – former Catalan government leader Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí – that are facing criminal charges in Spain for their roles in organising an independence

Michael Bakunin, the 19th century revolutionary Russian anarchist, identified Spain as the place where his creed was most likely to take root. In 1868, to get the ball rolling, Bakunin dispatched his disciple, Giuseppi Fanelli, to Spain. After some difficulty in raising the money for his train fare, Fanelli finally arrived in Madrid where he was introduced to a small group of printers who attended a working-class educational institute. Although Fanelli spoke only Italian and French and most of the print workers spoke only Spanish, his address made a dramatic impact. A shortage of money meant Fanelli could not stay long but he left behind copies of Bakunin’s speeches. These

‘Scotland,’ declared the Times in 1856, is ‘manifestly a country in want of a grievance.’ The same could be said of Catalonia, which held regional elections this week. Catalonia spent much of the nineteenth century adding to its store of grievances. In 1885 a deputation of politicians travelled to Madrid in a fruitless attempt to interest Spain’s government in a comprehensive list of their region’s ‘greuges’ (Catalan for grievances). A century later the post-Franco democratic settlement for Catalonia attempted to right these historical wrongs once and for all by granting the region unprecedented powers of self-government. Since then Catalonia’s autonomy has increased even further. Today, amongst other competencies, it has

The United Kingdom has an opportunity to become a more significant player in Latin America while setting an example for other European countries. Venezuela is an important test case of how truly ‘global’ post-Brexit Britain wants to be. Latin America has not seen a meaningful British presence in over 100 years. In colonial times, Britain was one of the leading powers with interests, particularly in the West Indies. In the 1820s, it supported the independence movements from Spain and built trading relationships with the newly formed countries. After most British business interests were sold to fund the country’s efforts in world war one, Britain largely disappeared as a major player,

According to ancient Moorish legend, when the world was created each land was given five wishes. Spain’s first four wishes – for clear skies, seas full of fish, good fruit, and beautiful women – were all granted, but the fifth, for good government, was denied on the grounds that to grant that too would create a paradise on earth. Certainly over the last couple of centuries, good government in Spain has tended to be conspicuous by its absence. Philosopher Ortega y Gasset summed up Spain’s tragic history and its desire to become more like the liberal democratic European countries in his famous phrase: ‘Spain is the problem and Europe the

Lidia Falcón O’Neill is a legendary figure in Spanish politics. Half a century ago, she stood up to Franco as head of a cell in the communist Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. In 1974, this opposition led to her being brutally tortured: ‘When she fainted they untied her and laid her on the ground. They woke her up with a bucket of water. … She stayed on the ground, wet, for hours, until they took her down to the cell. … On the sixth day, the torturers could not continue with the same sessions. They could no longer hang her on the wall because she was rapidly losing consciousness because of it. So,

A few years ago, when I was in the queue to catch a plane, a Spanish lady caught me watching her as she surreptitiously removed a sticker from her hand luggage, which meant it would have been stored in the hold. ‘Los españoles somos muy pícaros’ (we Spaniards are real rogues) she told me with a smile of complicity and a rueful shake of the head. Spaniards sometimes point out with a touch of pride that it was their country which pioneered the picaresque novel – a literary genre which tells the story of an ingenious rascal who lives by his wits, sometimes on the wrong side of the law.

In 1714, after a long siege, Spain managed to regain control of Barcelona after the War of Spanish Succession. Catalan nationalists point to the day Barcelona fell, 11 September 1714, as the point when Madrid began to strip their homeland of its ancient privileges, and three centuries of subjugation and repression began. To remind everyone of the importance of the year 1714, Barcelona fans chant in favour of independence for Catalonia when the Camp Nou football stadium clock shows that 17 minutes and 14 seconds of a match have passed. Meanwhile the day itself, 11 September, is commemorated every year as La Diada (‘The Day’), Catalonia’s national day. In most