Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Juan Carlos is an outwardly pleasant man and a genuinely popular monarch. He is credited with having converted a whole generation of the Spanish left from republicans into juancarlistas, Juan Carlos fans. His opponents are, however, not only those on the extreme right who point out that those ‘permanent and inalterable’ Movimiento Nacional principles he had sworn to uphold included a pledge to keep Spain in strict observance of ‘the doctrine of the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church’. The anti-monarchical right has its equivalent, more numerously, amongst those who have remained Republicans. These have become increasingly visible in recent years, with the republican flag now a fixture at left-wing demonstrations. These republicans cannot see why Spain, having expelled three of their five monarchs over 150 years, should have replaced a dictator with a king – especially one hand-picked by the same dictator.

  Within three years of Franco’s death in 1975, the king had not only buried the Movimiento Nacional principles that he had once sworn to uphold, he had buried the Movimiento altogether. By the end of 1978 Spain had become a democracy. Francoism was dead, the Movimiento had been dissolved and the voters were happily piling earth on the graves of both. It was a remarkable transformation. It saw Juan Carlos himself shed almost all his powers to become the largely ornamental head of a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. He is, in that sense, Europe’s last true king – the last monarch to have held the powers of a ruler. No other living European monarch has enjoyed such power, or given it all up. His supporters like to claim that he is also that rare thing, an elected king. When Spaniards approved their constitution in 1978, they voted for parliamentary monarchy.

  Yet Juan Carlos himself is also subject to a dose of Spanish silence. For Spanish journalists freely admit that the king – along with his family – is their last great taboo subject. ‘There is freedom of speech on everything, except the king and the monarchy,’ Cebrían tells González in their book. Journalists talk of autocensura, self-censorship. It is not something they are proud of. As one of Spain’s most prolific royal writers, Juan Balansó, put it (despite being a fervent Juan Carlos fan): ‘There is one thing worse than censorship, self-censorship.’ Juan Carlos is not easily criticised. His past in Franco’s shadow – even as his temporary replacement when the Caudillo was ill – is glossed over. His finances are not scrutinised. His private life is, well, private.

  ‘There was always a timid editor, prepared to suspect that behind this or that affair [involving royal advisor Manuel de Prado] one might find the king himself,’ wrote Pilar Urbano, a prominent journalist, after a financial scandal hit those close to the king in the 1990s.

  Spaniards generally give two explanations for this royal reverence. One is that the king deserves it, having seen through the Transición and squashed the 1981 coup. Another is that, given its history, the Spanish monarchy needs all the help it can get. ‘The fragility of the monarchy is greater than it may seem at first sight,’ warned Tusell. ‘In the Spanish case, the repetition of cases such as we have seen in other latitudes would have far more devastating effects … After all, the interruptions in our tradition of monarchy in contemporary times are far more pronounced.’

  In a rare breaking of ranks, Vicenç Navarro made a list of royal-related affairs which television journalism – in a country where only one in ten people buy a newspaper – had chosen to ignore completely. They included four ‘economic assessors of the Royal household’ who ended up in jail ‘without anybody investigating the relationship between them and the king’. There were, he said, a list of presents that went from yachts and palaces to luxury cars from ‘business groups and people who try to influence’ the king. ‘None of them have been commented on by our television stations, which is where most citizens garner their basic information on political life. Such silence would be unthinkable in other democracies.’ When the satirical magazine El Jueves brought out a book of royal cartoons called Tocando los Borbones, the editor complained that two privately owned television stations, Canal Plus and Telecinco, refused to run its advertisements. ‘The fact is that we worry that the monarchy is not well enough rooted, and that anything might finish it off,’ says a former El País editor, Juan Luis Cebrián.

  Given the British press’s – and newspaper readers’ – surfeit of interest in the UK royal family, there is a healthy side to this silence. If Spaniards and their newspapers are not interested in their politicians’ private lives, why should they intrude on the royal family’s? And if the royal family behaves properly in public, why worry about what it does behind closed doors?

  Compared to their British counterparts, the Spanish royals are, at least in public, remarkably modest. When I went to their Zarzuela Palace to see how they lived a few years ago, their press officer proudly showed me the dining room – with seating room for just eighteen. The palace, a former hunting lodge on the outskirts of Madrid, is both relatively small and very unstuffy. Nobody seemed to mind that I took a wrong turning out of the car park and got lost in the royal deer park afterwards. When I eventually found a guard post – pop music wafting out from a radio inside it – I was politely invited to drive myself down a short cut towards the proper exit. The relaxed atmosphere could not have been more distant from the starched surroundings of Britain’s royal family.

  Trailing the king and his offspring for a couple of days, I found him easy-going and hard-working. His style was more presidential than regal. Hands were shaken and backs, occcasionally, given a manly slap. Women were kissed on the hand. He was rather like a man seeking votes. ‘The king says they must go out to work daily, to be with the people,’ one staffer explained. The king, in other words, knows he must work to keep his popularity. Given his family’s history, that is obviously a sensible idea.

  Not all is perfect, however, in the life of a man who – by eschewing ostentation and getting down to street level – has avoided the spectacular own goals of other royal families. Occasionally, newspapers or journalists have broken ranks, running rumours about the king’s relationships with a number of women.

  Does the king’s ‘enthusiasm for beautiful women’ – as one biographer delicately puts it – matter to Spaniards? Not really. Gossiping is a national pastime. In the birthplace of ¡Hola! magazine and a dozen competitors (whose enthusiasm for royal scandals seems limited to those of other countries) it is also a large publishing and television industry. Spaniards enjoy the tittle-tattle but are rarely judgemental. ‘A Borbón will always be a Borbón,’ they say knowingly, referring to the far more colourful lives of previous monarchs. (Isabel II was said to be a nymphomaniac, while Alfonso XIII had three bastard children, one of whom, Leandro Alfonso, was formally recognised as such by a Spanish court in 2003.) It is a different matter, however, when that enthusiasm encourages, in the words of the same biographer, ‘attempts at blackmail by financiers’.

  Paul Preston, the professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, wrote the biography referred to above. He also sheds light on one of those episodes that Spanish writers generally ignore or skirt around in their – almost unanimously adulatory – descriptions of their king. In one of the most tragic moments of a difficult childhood, Juan Carlos shot his own brother dead. Juan Carlos, then seventeen, and fourteen-year-old Alfonsito were playing with a gun in the exiled family’s home in Portugal. No clear account of what happened has yet been given. The gun, it seems, was in Juan Carlos’s hands when it went off. The bullet from the .22 pistol either bounced off a wall or simply went straight into Alfonsito’s forehead. Juan Carlos’ father, Don Juan de Borbón, tried to keep his son alive. The wound, however, was mortal. He died a few minutes later. His father wrapped the teenage corpse in a Spanish flag. The incident must have been a key moment in Juan Carlos’s life – both in his relations with a father already using him as a pawn in his games with Franco and in the creation of his own personality, which was still in its formative years. ‘The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure … now seemed aff
licted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again,’ says Preston.

  On a rainy day in Madrid, I was reminded of the republican blood that seems to boil under the surface of a significant number of Spaniards. I had gone to hire a car. It was a Saturday and much of central Madrid was cordoned off. The king’s son and heir, Prince Felipe, was getting married to a television journalist, Letizia Ortiz. To the disgust of some hard-core conservatives, he had broken ranks with tradition. His bride was not just a commoner – granddaughter of a taxi driver – but a divorcee. The wedding ceremony at the Almudena Cathedral looked set to start under a torrential downpour.

  It was a sign of the family’s chequered history as on-off monarchs that this was the first royal wedding Madrid had seen since the prince’s great-grandfather, King Alfonso XIII, married a British princess, Victoria Eugenia, in 1906. That wedding had been marred by an anarchist bomb attack on their carriage that spattered her dress with the victims’ blood. Twenty-five years later, in 1931, she would be forced into exile after the Republic was proclaimed. She did not return until 1968, and then only for the baptism of Prince Felipe. She died the following year. Her remains were eventually taken from Lausanne to the royal pudridero, literally the rotting chamber, at the sombre, imposing, five-hundred-year-old royal monastery in San Lorenzo del Escorial – where they still await final burial alongside those of other members of the Spanish royal family.

  Security for the royal wedding was tight. Police helicopters clattered overhead. City centre metro stations had been closed. Madrid was only too aware of what a handful of determined terrorists could do. Just a couple of months earlier Islamist bombers had killed 191 people in simultaneous attacks on four commuter trains into the city.

  The heavens had opened, keeping most people at home. They would watch the wedding of their future monarch on the television. His bride, a former newsreader whose voice they used to hear on state television every day, had hardly said a word in public since they got engaged and she disappeared off their screens. (One newspaper previously reported that a special safe had been bought to lock up her divorce papers.)

  Three young men in green company uniforms were sitting behind the counter at the car hire place. ‘It looks like the royal wedding is a washout,’ I said, making conversation. They sniggered. ‘¡Qué se mojen!’ – ‘Let them get wet!’ – said one. The others sniggered some more. Spain’s royal family, I was reminded, was not universally loved.

  A poll published in 2005 in El Mundo suggested that trouble might be brewing for Spain’s monarchy. Almost a quater of Spaniards declared themselves to be republicans. That was fifty per cent more than five years earlier. Nearly forty per cent of eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds were republicans – slightly more than those who declared themselves to be monarchists. This was despite the fact that very few said they had a poor opinion of the king or his son as individuals.

  Juan Carlos oversaw the Transición, stopped a coup and gave up the supremacy handed to him as Europe’s last old-fashioned, power-wielding monarch. His personal trajectory – from declared supporter of Francoism and its principles to diehard democrat – sums up the Transición itself. The pacto del olvido was the price one sector of Spanish society, that of the Civil War vencidos and their heirs, paid so that Juan Carlos could pull the Francoists into democracy. If the pact, and the silence, is being broken now, it is – at least in part – because most of the latter were so thoroughly converted.

  The mechanism may have worked, but it was hardly fair. ‘Cancelling out the past was justified as a way of achieving reconciliation. The division born during the Civil War and boosted during the terrible post-war period had to be overcome. Proof that it had not been overcome, and remained latent, was that one side – that of the losers – was forced to forget as a condition for taking part in the new game,’ says Morán.

  Most Spaniards now believe democracy was somehow inevitable. Spain had become much wealthier. Its traditional class structure was broken down by the move from the countryside to the city. An urban middle class was in place by the time Franco died, ready to demand democracy and make it work.

  Franco’s legacy has not fully disappeared, though.

  One of the things that helped prepare Spain for democracy was tourism. This took off, and then boomed, under Franco. It made an indelible mark on the country that persists today. The pink-skinned tourists brought with them not just money but the mores and attitudes of democratic northern Europe. The wind of change that blew south with the first package tourists was symbolised by something that, when first seen on a Spanish beach, shocked and delighted people in equal proportions – the bikini. To find out just how those two little pieces of cloth had changed Spain, and how the hordes who arrive every summer continue to do so, I would have to head for the beach. The Spanish costas, in all their terrible, garish glory, awaited.

  4

  How the Bikini Saved Spain

  The route along the lower half of Spain’s eastern coast has been travelled many times by invaders and colonisers. They have come south from Europe, north from Africa or, in pirate or trading ships, over the Mediterranean horizon. The place names along the coastline that stretches north from the semi-desert of Almería at Cabo de Gata provide constant reminders: from the Carthaginian Qart Hadast, now Cartagena; to the Romans’ Valentia and Dianium, now Valencia and Denia; and, in far greater number, to Moorish settlements with names like Alicante (Al-akant) and Alcoy or Benicassim and Beniali.

  Driving north from Almería I am reminded, once more, that this is Spain’s driest, dustiest corner. Every time I come here, I am shocked by the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Even Old Castile, with its parched, yellowed plains, has nothing on it. Water is the local gold, fought over by neighbours, villages and towns. The politicians in Madrid invent, and then scrap, pharaonic systems for diverting the rivers of northern Spain down to this parched corner of the country. Ancient irrigation systems, Roman or Moorish in origin, allow the soil to perform the miracle of growing things. The plants traditionally grown here give an idea of the almost biblical nature of the place. There are acid-sweet loquats, almonds, carobs (which supposedly kept St John the Baptist alive in the wilderness) and, inland at Elche, ancient plantations of date palms that transport you straight to the Arabian desert. The mountains here are all rock. They rear up in great, glinting shards or loom, hazy, grey and menacing, in the distant, pulsating heat.

  It all sounds very uninviting. Nineteenth-century travellers were advised to skip this part of Spain. But one adventurous British lady, Mrs Ramsay, came up this coast by train in 1874 and sternly ticked off fellow travellers for choosing ‘to pass this lovely country by night’. She found, at least to the north of Valencia, that ‘the railway passes close to the sea, which stretches its calm blue expanse away to the horizon; not a sail breaks the loneliness; the ripple washes lazily into sheltered sandy coves; the rocks are covered with heath, palmitos (dwarf palm trees), thyme, and all kinds of aromatic herbs; and the stately pines give a peculiar repose to the landscape.’ Certainly, the arid climate did not stop this coast attracting the attention of the great Mediterranean cultures. Four centuries before Christ it produced La Dama de Elche, the most spectacular sculpture of the Iberian, pre-Roman culture. The elegant Dama wears what look like elaborately carved cart-wheels over her ears and boasts what must have been the best lips in antiquity.

  This is also one of the far-flung outposts of flamenco, where it was sung in local mines. So, I thought, it was still appropriate to have the full, fibrous voice of singer Camarón de la Isla filling the car with, alternately, his pain or alegría as I turned north after a long road trip east from Seville. With Camarón keeping me company, the dusty landscape slid quickly past. A few hours later, I was a quarter of the way up the coast, passing Alicante.

  A few miles north from Alicante a thin, mysterious, pole-like structure began to emerge over some distant hills. As the kilometres ticked by, it remained
virtually unchanged in size. I realised that I must be looking at something a long way off in the distance. Eventually, the pole began to thicken and, cresting one of the hills along this bumpy coastline, I finally realised I was reaching what the Moors called Beni-Darhim (the son, or followers, of Darhim). The gradually broadening shape ahead of me was Spain’s tallest building, the Gran Hotel Bali. It stood like a proud, raised finger on the edge of a place whose current name is not only easily recognised, but has become a modern legend of its own – for this, finally, was Benidorm.

  If anywhere in Spain symbolises the country’s latest invasion, this is it. A fresh invading horde, sun-hat and sandal-wearing northern European tourists, has rampaged its way along this coast over the past forty years. The horde has made Benidorm its capital. This time there has been no resistance. The burghers of Benidorm have rolled out a welcome carpet of concrete, tarmacadam and brick. Jointly they have vandalised what was once one of the most beautiful spots on the Spanish coast.

  Even those of us who are instinctively appalled by Benidorm, however, cannot help but be awe-struck by what has happened here. For locals it is a genuine miracle. The closest thing I have to a Spanish family, one side of my partner’s maternal family, comes from Tárbena, a village of six hundred people stuck high up in the mountains above Benidorm. The genetic codes of the peoples who surged backwards and forwards across La Marina – as this part was known until a tourism marketing department renamed it the Costa Blanca, the White Coast – are imprinted somewhere in that of my own children.