Spanish views from a small town

The battle over the Pazo de Meirás, in Sada, A Coruña, continues. This manor house was built by the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán. After her death, her family was tricked into selling it to a religious order, that turned around and "gave" it to General Franco, as a "present" from the local people. To fix it up, a mandatory subscription was set up, to which  everyone in the province of A Coruña had to forcibly contribute. Now, seventy years later, a judge has mandated that it was illegally given to Franco, and that it now belongs to the State as a historical site. The Francos were ordered to hand over the keys by either last week, or this week. Since they tried to fill trucks with the contents, the judge ordered them to return anything they had taken out of the manor house, because the sentence referred not only to the real estate, but also to the contents. Looking over things, it was discovered that Franco had pilfered important items from other palaces, and even the Ro...

I'm posting quite late tonight. Tomorrow is a holiday, so I can't do my weekly Saturday shopping. This evening, right after my husband got home, I took his car and went to take care of helping empty the supermarkets. Like I said yesterday, the times we're living in are more dystopian than normal. One proof of this is that today the central government decreed the closure of all night clubs and discos. Bars and cafés must close at 1:00AM, and cannot allow new customers to enter after midnight. There is no smoking allowed in the streets nor the terraces, and there are special restriction in place with elderly residences. No, this isn't normal.  What also isn't normal is the number of national tourists there are in our townships. This evening in Boiro, where I tend to do my shopping, it was chock-a-bloc. Yes, practically everyone had their mask on, and I only saw one man sitting at a terrace with a cigarette in his hand who wasn't sure whether to light it or not. Bu...

The virus doesn't care who you are or what you've done with your life. It attacks its victims at will, sometimes passing through without a second thought, sometimes killing its host. That is what makes it so unfair. Disease of any kind only takes into account our biological humanity, not our overall humanity. One of the deaths this week was Antonio González Pacheco. By that name, he is barely known in Spain and certainly not outside the country. But he is better known here by Billy el Niño (Billy the Kid). He got that knick because his face looked like a little boy's when he was younger. But he was more of a spawn of the Devil than an angel of a boy. He joined the police and was incorporated into the Brigada Político-Social , the feared department under Franco that investigated those that dissented. During his tenure, he used torture during interrogations, and was brought under suspicion by the untimely death of the student, Enrique Ruano, while in custody, in 1969. Af...

Finally, finally, Spain is not an exception among European countries. Finally, finally, her dictator is no longer interred in a national monument created for his adoration.  Last Thursday, Franco was finally taken out of the mausoleum he built outside Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos . This being Spain, and gossip being king of just about every television channel, it was plastered on every television screen. Even an online newspaper, of which I have an app, was sending out minute by minute notifications. "En directo..." The only ones allowed to be present were the crew carrying out the exhumation, the Minister of Justice, and part of the Franco family, now grandchildren. The press was only allowed to film outside. Absolutely no filming, not even by the family, was allowed at the exhumation nor at the final burial. So, news coverage was ample that day, showing every moment, every hiccup, every "Viva Franco" uttered, every outstretched hand upraised, every pre-co...

The last time there was an assassination in Spain, was when Admiral Carrillo Blanco, head of Franco's government, was blown sky high by ETA back in 1973. Those were the last days of the dictatorship, when people were trying to shake off the grey yoke of Franco, and bring Spain forward into the light of the rest of Europe, and ETA decided to take advantage of that social unrest.  Juan Prim in 1870, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1897, José Canalejas in 1912, and Eduardo Dato in 1921, were the previous heads of government assassinated by anarchists and republicans during convulsed social moments in Spanish history. The latest moment of social tension is happening this year, between francoists and less nostalgic people, over the exhumation of Franco from his Valle de los Caídos , the Valley of the Fallen.  When earlier this year, the new Socialist government announced its intention of removing Franco's body from the monument he created to those fallen in the Civil War, and w...

Google is telling me today that it's the 166th anniversary of the birth of Emilia Pardo Bazán, a feminist writer born in A Coruña, and who was highly criticized during her lifetime for writing about working women and defending the education of women. She was a prolific writer, essayist, and speaker, and her most famous novel is Los Pazos de Ulloa , a novel about the decadence and rot at the heart of the traditional land-holding Galician aristocracy. I don't think she would have like Franco very much if she had lived to see the Civil War. He represented the pretentious land-holder she criticized in her novels.  Emilia inherited the remains of a castle, or pazo , that had been almost entirely destroyed by Napoleon's troops. She remodelled the castle, and built upon the ruins. The origins of the Pazo de Meirás are therefore sixteenth century, with rebuilding in the late nineteenth, and major work added in the late 1930's. Still, in pictures it has the aspect of a mediev...

Leaving Madrid on the A6 heading northeast, a few kilometers before reaching the Sierra de Guadarrama, you can see to the left topping a small hill, a large white cross. If you take the next exit and get on the road to the Escorial, you will pass a road leading up to a gated entrance, beneath that cross. That is the Valle de los Caídos. It is a mausoleum, created and built by Franco. His intention was to commemorate the founder of the Falange Española, the Spanish fascist party, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was re-interred here, and the Nationalist soldiers that died in the Civil War. When the time came, Franco was also interred here.  I remember on a trip to Madrid, on the way back my daughter and I went to the Monastery of the Escorial, and saw the entrance leading up. I thought to visit and pointed the car up the hill. Until I saw the sign by the gate, that had the prices for visitors on foot and visitors by car. I decided not to go, so as not to further help pay for the ...

From the outside Spain has always appeared to be a profoundly Catholic country, where religion and politics seem to be intertwined and everyone goes to Mass on Sundays. That was true once upon a time. Until the middle of the nineteenth century and a wave of anticlericalism by liberal governments, everyone had perforce to belong to the Catholic Church. The Inquisition made sure of that. After the "separation" of Church and State, a Spanish citizen could belong to a different religion without civil retaliation. But the Church still remained a force to be reckoned with. When George Borrow travelled the length and breadth of Spain as he described in The Bible in Spain in 1843, Catholicism was still the only religion allowed, though Protestant preachers were permitted to enter the country. As of 1868, though, freedom of religion became the law. Which did not mean the Church lost power. While it had lost a lot of property during the nineteenth century, it did not lose all of it no...

Forty years ago today, Spain changed. It began with a death. The death that was announced on black and white national television by the teary-eyed Prime Minister, Carlos Arias Navarro. "Franco ha muerto." The fascist dictator of Spain for almost forty desolate years was eighty-two years old. He had been in and out of the hospital for the past year. One could say he died of old age and the complications of Parkinson's disease. But before he died, in September he signed the last death sentences for five men. They were the last to be executed in Spain before the death penalty was abolished in 1978. Franco was ornery to the last.  He was buried in the mausoleum built by Republican prisoners of war under conditions Hitler would have approved of. This mausoleum, the Valle de los Caídos , has an enormous white cross. It actually occupies a small mountain that was hollowed out to create it. Driving northwest on the A-6 out of Madrid, you can see it to the left as you approach...

He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it. Then Spain is going to repeat a lot of stuff. Beginning with Franco. Yes, you would think that a dictator who died just forty years ago would be remembered along with his deeds, but not in this country. Older people will sometimes talk about him, usually with nostalgia. They'll say that under Franco the Guardia Civil would patrol all the villages on foot and if anything ever got stolen it would appear the next day, etc. Yes, the quasi-military police force would patrol on foot, but they wouldn't be looking only for thieves. They would be listening to people talking around them and if someone were acting suspiciously. They could bring someone in for questioning on a whim. That, the older people choose to forget. But younger people mostly don't know anything about Franco. Some don't even know he was Spanish. That can be because of two things. Parents our age and older, who have had it with grandparents who never stopped ...