The road south from Granada towards the Mediterranean rises gently uphill as it rounds the western fringes of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. As you crest the rise, the sierra swells upwards on the left, a first, dramatic rampart towards the Mulhacén, mainland Spain’s highest peak. This is where the rivers start running south, rushing for the nearby sea. It is, however, the name of this pass – rather than the countryside around it – that impresses. For this, a modest sign indicates, is the ‘Puerto del Suspiro del Moro’, ‘The Pass of the Moor’s Sigh’.

It was here, according to legend, that Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Granada, looked back for the final time towards the city. Boabdil, whose Mediterranean kingdom had stretched west to Málaga and east to Almería, was a sentimental man. Standing here on a January day in 1492, the story goes, he wept. It was not just the end of his personal reign, but of 781 years of Muslim kingdoms in Spain. The Granadinos still celebrate the Fiesta de la Reconquista, of the Reconquest, every 2 January. They are not always keen to recognise it, but a century and a half must still pass before their city can claim to have been Christian for longer than it was a place where, principally, Mohammed was revered.

Boabdil was on his way to La Alpujarra, the steep, south-facing foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragón had left him a small fiefdom in return for his capitulation. As he stood looking back towards Granada and his recently abandoned Alhambra fortress-palace, his formidable mother, Ayxa, is reputed to have scolded him. Washington Irving, the American writer who was so entranced by the Alhambra when he arrived here in the 1820s, put her words this way: ‘‘‘You do well,” said she, “to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man’.’’ Irving did not invent the story himself. Well before he arrived here on his horse, this had been known as ‘The Moor’s Sigh’.  ‘La Cuesta de Las Lágrimas’, ‘The Slope of Tears’.

The year Granada was taken, bringing almost eight centuries of Christian Reconquista of Iberia to a formal end, was extraordinary. It is hard to overestimate the importance, not just to Spain but to the world, of the events that unfurled under the joint flags of Castile and Aragón. This year still conjures up a one-line childhood rhyme which I used to memorise dates. ‘In 1492,’ I learnt,‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ On the far side of the Atlantic, indeed, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, creating a colony on the island of Hispaniola – now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Spain’s Jews, meanwhile, were expelled on the orders of Isabella and Ferdinand. This couple, known as the Catholic Kings, had, by uniting their realms, effectively founded modern Spain (though it would take until 1512 to fit in the last piece of the puzzle, Navarre). Today’s Sephardic Jews, clustered in communities from Los Angeles to Paris to Tel Aviv, are the descendants of that diaspora. Legend has it that some families still conserve, five hundred years later, the old iron key to their house in Toledo. At a synagogue in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo I was once able to converse, in an admittedly stuttering fashion, with an elderly man using two similar languages that we could both understand – his Ladino and my Castilian Spanish. The old man’s Ladino – a quaint, time-warped version of Spanish conserved over centuries by the Sephardic community – might have been even more easily understood by Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote and a contemporary of William Shakespeare. The expulsion of the Jews was just the first stage in a process of ethnic and religious cleansing. The Moors themselves were also gradually obliged to convert to Christianity and, when they refused or only pretended to do so, eventually expelled.

Boabdil’s melancholy trip into the Alpujarra led him to one of the most beautiful spots in Spain. The steep slopes of the Alpujarra hills are covered in scrub, deciduous woodland, olives or small orchards of apple, cherry, fig, pear, orange, lemon, medlar and almond trees. Deep gullies cut into the hillsides which, in places, are stripped nearly bare by erosion. All is bathed in that special, clear, whitish light of south and central Spain. Watered by snow-melt and springs from the Sierra Nevada, this was the ‘desert island’ discovered by writer Gerald Brenan. His Bloomsbury friends, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, rode mules up through the valleys to stay at his home in Yegen in the 1920s. Brenan was struck here by the stillness and the quality of the thin air. Sounds from a village four miles away – barking dogs, men singing flamenco’s cante jondo, even the noise of running water – would travel crisply across the valley. There was ‘a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing over one that I have never come across anywhere else’. Woolf recalled ‘scrambling on the hillside among fig trees and olives … as excited as a schoolgirl on holiday’.

In those days the tightly huddled houses in the pueblos were a drab, unpainted grey. The standard of living for some had not changed for centuries. Poorer families boasted just one possession – a cooking pot. There were no metalled roads and no money for whitewash. Now there are not only roads – though these are still bone-rattlers in places – but the white-painted villages gleam like Christmas decorations scattered down the steep hillsides. Visitors like to think they have always been like that. In fact the Alpujarra villages, like so many places and people around Spain, only became wealthy enough to pretty themselves up later in the twentieth century.

Driving towards Yegen from the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh on the high road towards Trevélez, which some claim is Spain’s highest village, another roadside sign gives a clue to the history of Spain’s Moors. More particularly, it tells of the moriscos, the Moorish population that nominally converted to Christianity after Boabdil’s defeat and his subsequent move, a few years later, to north Africa. Here, cutting under one of the tight curves that look down into the precipitous, bare valleys where the Trevélez, Poqueira and Guadalfeo rivers flow, is the Barranco de la Sangre, the Gully of Blood. The moriscos of La Alpujarra, in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to the customs, language, clothes, veils and even bathing practices that had been banned by decree, rebelled in 1568. A plaque on a house in the nearby village of Válor, erected recently by a group of Spanish converts to Islam, marks the site of the home of Aben Humeya, the leader of the revolt. ‘To Aben Humeya and the moriscos, the height of freedom for Al Andalus,’ it says.

Rather than the height of freedom, however, the rebellion was part of the death throes of Moorish Spain. One of the worst battles was here, in the Gully of Blood. Legend has it the blood of the Christian soldiers flowed uphill in order not to mix with the Moorish, crypto-Islamic blood of the moriscos.

Forty years later the moriscos – who still accounted, for example, for a third of the population of the Valencia region – were forced to leave. Some 275,000 of them were ordered out in 1609. Many died of hunger or exhaustion. Others were massacred on their arrival in North Africa, or were killed even before they had managed to leave Spain.

The moriscos, and the Moors themselves, had always seemed to me just another quaint, if important and romantic, part of Spanish history. Their presence in modern Spain (except in language and place names) was solely architectural. Here, after all, were the splendid Alhambra palace, the vast mezquita in Córdoba with its 580 columns and the hilltop Alcazaba fortresses overlooking Málaga and Almería. They had left, too, some uniquely Spanish architectural forms, where east and west overlapped to produce the hybrid mudéjar and mozárabe styles in churches and monasteries.

Occasionally, Al Andalus would reappear in the news. Muslims, for example, tried to gain access for themselves and other religions to pray at the Córdoba mezquita – which now houses the city’s cathedral – but were turned down by the Vatican. Those who prostrate themselves before the mezquita’s sparkling, golden mihrab can still be thrown out. In Granada, meanwhile, a group of European converts eventually got money out of the United Arab Emirates to build a smart, gleaming new mosque on top of the Albaicín. It symbolically overlooks the Alhambra from a charming barrio of winding lanes and cypress-filled gardens that once boasted twenty-eight mosques. That, I thought, was it. Al Andalus was a great tourism draw. Granada, with its Moroccan gift shops and restaurants offering couscous and tajines, had even become something of a Moorish theme park. Here was one piece of history that Spaniards were not about to argue over.

I could not have been more wrong. Late in 2004, José María Aznar, the former prime minister whose Conservative People’s Party (PP) had been ejected from power in favour of the Socialists of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at elections that March, gave a lecture at Washington’s Georgetown University. His party’s defeat had come three days after 191 Madrid railway commuters were killed in the west’s worst Islamist terror attack since September 11. It had been the most traumatic moment in recent Spanish history. To understand the circumstances surrounding that defeat, Aznar told the Georgetown students, they should wind the clock back to 711. This, Spanish schoolchildren are meant to know, was the moment when a Berber called Tarik Bin Ziyad crossed the Mediterranean with a small army and began a swift invasion of Iberia (whilst also leaving his name behind at the large rock known as Jabal-al-Tarik, the Rock of Tarik, now Gibraltar).

‘Spain’s problem with Al-Qaida starts in the eighth century … when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity,’ Aznar said. ‘This reconquista process was very long, lasting some eight hundred years.’

Aznar was widely ridiculed for his words. They were an attempt to relate the train attacks to Al Andalus. Christian Spain, he meant, had long been a target for Islamic crusaders. An old enemy, in other words, had returned.

Few people agreed. One who might have done, however, was a bearded and robed man then believed to be hiding out somewhere in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden had shown a personal interest in Al-Andalus, signalling it to his followers as an apostate territory and lamenting its loss to Islam. On the day in October, 2001, that the United States began its campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Qaida founder issued one of his famous videotapes. He was followed by his number two, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. ‘Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus should be repeated,’ al-Zawahiri said. Two months before the Madrid attacks, Bin Laden himself returned to the theme, lamenting the weakness of the Arab world. ‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus,’ he said on a tape broadcast by Al Jazeera.

A newspaper editorial summed up the feelings of those Spaniards who had angrily rejected Aznar’s policies and his disastrous handling of the bombings at the polls that March. ‘In their reinvention of the past, and their vindication of the crusades between Islam and Christianity, there is a disturbing similarity between Aznar and Bin Laden,’ huffed El País. Spain’s Muslims, be they immigrant Moroccans or local converts, agreed.

Aznar was not the only outraged Spaniard talking of a conspiracy to turn the clock back several centuries. A few weeks earlier, Spain’s leading clergyman, the arch-conservative Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, had trodden a similar path. ‘Some people wish to place us in the year 711,’ Cardinal Rouco said. He was complaining about rumours that the Socialist government planned to put other religions or denominations, be they Islam, Judaism or the Protestant churches, on the same footing as Roman Catholicism – which, amongst other things, has a near stranglehold on religious teaching at schools. ‘It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.’

Once again, I found, Spaniards were bickering over the meaning of their own history. Only this time it was about a period that stretched back, in British terms, to even before the days of the Vikings. It seemed that the country’s self-image was somehow at stake. Should Spain be defined as a proudly Roman Catholic nation that emerged, or re-emerged, from a valiant eight-century battle against Islam? Or should it, as the historian Américo Castro first proposed decades ago, think of itself as being forged from a historic encounter between religions and cultures, including both Islam and Judaism? For a country of inevitably intimate relations with a Muslim world that is clearly visible across the Mediterranean from its southernmost shores, these are important questions.

This latest row had been sparked by the tragic, dramatic events of those four bitter, yet historic, days in March 2004. These were the four days bracketed, at one end, by the train bombings and, at the other, by the surprise ousting of Aznar’s party from power.

Early on the morning of 11 March, Luis Garrudo, the doorman of a small block of flats close to the railway station in Alcalá de Henares, a Madrid dormitory town, noticed a white Renault Kangoo van parked across the street. It was a bright, spring morning. Three men busied themselves around the van. They seemed dressed for the coldest of winter days. Their heads and faces were all but hidden behind scarves, hats and hoods.

‘When I saw them I thought they looked like armed robbers or something like that, though it didn’t make much sense at that time of the morning,’ Luis told me when I went to see him twenty-four hours later. ‘They were all covered up around their heads and necks, and it wasn’t even cold.’

At just before 7 a.m. Luis walked the 200 metres to the railway station to pick up a copy of Metro, a free daily morning newspaper. He found himself walking behind one of the men from the van. ‘He seemed to be in a hurry,’ he told me. ‘He was walking very quickly, carrying something and, again, I could hardly see his face at all.’

Luis thought, from the white scarf tied high across his neck and chin, that he might be a Real Madrid fan. ‘All I could see was the scarf and something covering the top of his head. You could only really see his eyes. By the time I got back, the other two men had gone. The van was still there.’

Luis was walking behind one of the worst mass murderers in recent European history. For this was one of several young Muslim radicals and small-time crooks equipped with thirteen bombs. A few minutes later they started hopping from carriage to carriage, and from train to train, across platforms packed full of early morning workers – builders, office cleaners, electricians and schoolteachers. This was the 8 a.m. start crowd, those who had to be at building sites and warehouses well before most office workers had even left their homes. Many, more than a quarter, were immigrants, attracted by the cheap rents this far out of the Spanish capital. The man Luis Garrudo followed would place at least one of thirteen cheap sports bags in at least one of four different trains. Each bag contained a mobile phone, a copper detonator, nuts and screws to act as shrapnel, and some twelve kilos of Spanish-made Goma 2 Eco explosives.

The bombers targeted four separate trains which passed through Alcalá de Henares between 7.00 a.m. and 7.15. In some cases they may have ridden them for the first few stops as they headed in towards Madrid’s Atocha station, distributing the bombs amongst the packed carriages. Within half-an-hour, Europe’s initiation into the new tactics of radical Islamist terror was complete.

The bombs were detonated by the alarms in the mobile telephones. They started going off at 7.37 and had wrought their full destruction by 7.43. In some trains those who went to help the wounded from the first bomb were caught by a second or third. By the time they finished exploding, there were four trains each with immense, jagged holes blown through several carriages. The smoking hulks were strung along the line between Atocha, where one train had just arrived, and the working-class barrio of El Pozo del Tío Raimundo. The latter’s name was once synonymous with the poverty of immigrant workers arriving from other parts of Spain. One bomb had exploded in a wagon known as ‘little Romania’ because it was where immigrants from that country gathered every morning. Fifty-four of the dead were immigrants.

There were Muslims, too, and schoolchildren, babies, pregnant women, young couples and parents with their young children. All of these, and more, would die, their bodies peppered with shrapnel or the breath squeezed out of them by the blow and suck of the blast.

Those who survived recall the ghastly silence that followed immediately after. Some will never forget. ‘It still flashes through my mind continuously … The silence, the dust and the things I saw that I can’t bring myself to describe to you,’ Clara Escribano, a survivor from the train at Santa Eugenia, told me months later.

The first emergency workers to arrive were also struck by the stillness of this tableau of horror. ‘It was the silence that made it so different from other attacks,’ Dr Ervigio Corral, a veteran of ETA attacks, told me. Dr Corral was the man in charge of Madrid’s ambulance services. He had rushed to Atocha station and was the first to enter some coaches. The dead, or their remains, were everywhere. ‘The only living people left inside were those who could not move. They were almost all suffering from burst eardrums, which meant they could not hear you. When you asked what was wrong with them, they did not answer. They asked you for help only with their eyes.’

Europe had only seen one attack on this scale before, in 1988, when 270 people were killed by a Libyan bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, forcing it to crash into the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

Dr Corral would see some eighty corpses in that first hour, in Atocha and 500 yards up the track where a second bombed train had ground to a halt after bits of carriage had been blown into apartments overlooking the track. Over the next thirty-six hours he would personally give the news of death to some 130 bereaved and distraught families.

The death toll could have been higher. Of the thirteen bombs, only ten exploded. Madrileños found out that day, to their surprise, that they had one of the best-equipped ambulance and emergency services in Europe. Two field hospitals were set up, hundreds of volunteers called in and, of the 400 injured rushed to hospital, only one died on the way. Fourteen more died after they got there. The timing of the attacks helped, too. Hospitals were just changing shifts, so had twice the normal number of staff at hand. Operating theatres were empty. ‘If it happened again, I would just ask that it happen at the same time,’ a doctor who treated the injured told me.

My apartment lies just a block from the Gregorio Marañón hospital, which took most of the injured. That morning my children waited ten minutes to cross the road on their way to school. The stream of ambulances tearing past made their usual zebra crossing impassable.

Spain had not lived a moment of such enormous drama and tension since Civil Guard lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero and his men stormed parliament in their failed 1981 coup attempt.

A massacre of this kind was simply of a different scale to the Basque separatist ETA bombs that had killed and maimed with frustrating regularity on Madrid’s streets for three decades. Madrileños had marched in their millions to protest against some ETA killings. They were rarely, however, touched by them directly.

There was nothing anonymous about the death and carnage on what soon became known as 11-M or ‘el Once M’. Everybody, it seemed, had been directly or indirectly affected. If they had not seen it, survived it or had to work in the middle of it, they knew someone who had. My own, not terribly large, network of friends and acquaintances soon turned up half a dozen ‘somebody who’ stories: a schoolteacher lost a former pupil and spent the day trying to prevent her teenage pupils rushing home to see if parents, relatives and friends were okay; a psychologist worked all night as a volunteer helping families identify bodies at a huge morgue set up in the city’s exhibition centre; a fireman long ago retired into an office job put on his helmet once more, went to Atocha, wept, pulled himself together and got to work; and a doctor, arrived at the gates of Atocha to catch her morning train, saw the crowds running, threw up and fled in terror.

Perhaps I should have expected it, but it was shocking to see how quickly the narrative of what had happened that day – and over the next three days until the general election – split into separate, conflicting and angrily confrontational strands. If Spaniards can argue over historic events of thirteen centuries ago, perhaps it is inevitable that they should do so over history as it happens. El 11-M, with its horror and the chain of political events it set off, now looks set to be one of those events on which Spaniards will never agree. The division, unfortunately, is on sadly familiar political lines. On this matter, las dos Españas, the two Spains, of history are once more at loggerheads. The twin versions often rely on putting belief above proof, on turning to those you trust rather than the evidence presented.

There was nothing casual about the timing of the attacks. It was two and a half years to the day since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. It was also, more importantly, three days before a general election. If the bombers aim was to influence the course of those elections, they were highly successful. Even they, however, could not have foreseen exactly how, or why, over the next three extraordinary days, they would do so.

It took just a few hours to add political confusion to human catastrophe. Most people immediately suspected ETA. The magnitude and style of the attacks, however, left sufficient room for doubt. ETA, after all, had never acted on this scale, or with this degree of wanton, arbitrary barbarity. The first authoritative voice to publicly point the finger, however, came from the Basque Country itself. Basque regional premier Juan José Ibarretxe denounced the work of ‘vermin’ and ‘murderers’. ‘ETA is writing its last, disgraceful, pages,’ he said. If Ibarretxe said it was ETA, it was reasonable to believe he would know. The Basque government’s police, after all, had its own units specialised in fighting ETA. Nobody realised at the time that this was simply one of the first knee-jerk political reactions of a day laden with them. For his own political reasons, Ibarretxe wanted to be the first to heap shame on ETA.

The government soon followed suit. Their front man for this was Interior Minister Ángel Acebes. The strings, however, were being pulled directly from the Moncloa Palace where Aznar had set up a crisis committee. This excluded the political opposition. It also, to begin with, excluded the country’s intelligence services, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI). If any minutes or notes were taken at that committee, they were later destroyed. Aznar’s team at the Moncloa Palace prime minister’s office wiped computer records, including security copies, of their eight years in power before leaving a few weeks later. Aznar only left paper copies of official, legal documents – and the 12,000-euro bill for erasing the computers.

‘The government does not have any doubt at all that ETA is responsible,’ Acebes said. ‘ETA was looking to commit a massacre in Spain and it has managed it.’ It was a line that, with only slowly waning levels of insistence but rapidly evaporating levels of credibility, the government would stick to for most of the next four days. ETA’s favourite explosive, Titadyn 30 AG had, they initially said, been used. Basque terrorists had, three months earlier, been caught smuggling bombs onto trains into Madrid. Just a few weeks earlier an ETA van-bomb packed with explosives, apparently heading for the same Madrid suburbs where the bombs were planted, had been captured. One of the terrorists arrested that day said there had also been a failed attempt at planting thirteen rucksack-bombs at a ski resort. These were all reasons to suspect ETA. They were not, however, proof.

Before Acebes spoke there came a denial from those normally damned as ETA’s mouthpieces – the leaders of the banned Batasuna party. ‘This attack is not the work of ETA. This is an action carried out by the Arab resistance movement,’ said Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi. Otegi, who left jail in 1990 after serving half of a six-year prison sentence for his part in an ETA kidnapping, had never before condemned the group’s attacks. This time he publicly expressed ‘absolute repulsion’ for a ‘massacre … that was indiscriminate and affected mainly working-class people’.

‘We want to make it absolutely clear. The izquierda abertzale (the patriotic left) does not even consider as a hypothesis that ETA is behind what happened in Madrid. Neither the target nor the modus operandi allow one to say ETA is behind it,’ he said.

His denial acted like a red rag to the government bull. Aznar harboured a blind hatred for ETA. He was now convinced they were trying to wriggle off the hook. Aznar personally rang the most important newspaper editors, the first time some had received a call in eight years. ‘What Otegi is trying to do is pass the blame onto the Islamists in order to gain time,’ he told Pedro J. Ramírez, editor of El Mundo.

‘He guaranteed to me that it was ETA,’ Jesús Ceberio, editor of El País, said afterwards. ‘It was an assurance given in absolute terms.’

Aznar’s calls produced opposite reactions. Ramírez, realising Aznar had failed to give concrete evidence, took the word ETA out of the headline of his special mid-afternoon edition. El País, by contrast, added it in, declaring ‘ETA slaughter in Madrid’. ‘I clearly made a mistake,’ a bitter Ceberio admitted later.

In the past, however, it had been unthinkable for Batasuna politicians to condemn ETA’s acts. Batasuna had, in fact, recently been banned. Otegi’s denials were just one more element that made doubt obligatory – at least until the smoking gun, the killer piece of evidence, could be turned up.

The more ETA protested it was not them, the louder the government insisted it was. They, and anybody else who gave public credence to their words, were involved in ‘an attempt by malicious people to divert people’s attention’, Acebes said.

As I hurtled back along the motorway towards Madrid that morning, having been caught working out of town, I recalled how the People’s Party had sold a very different line on ETA just a few weeks earlier. ‘ETA mata, pero no miente’, ‘ETA murders, but it does not lie,’ the former interior minister and party boss in the Basque Country, Jaime Mayor Oreja, had said. Major Oreja, a political heavyweight and former candidate to succeed Aznar as party leader, had produced the phrase after ETA called a regional truce in Catalonia. That truce followed a secret meeting with Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, leader of a Catalan separatist party. Mayor Oreja’s phrase was his way of accusing Carod-Rovira of lying when he claimed not to have done a deal with ETA to stop it killing in Catalonia. It was also an attempt to hurt the Socialists, who had Carod-Rovira as a coalition partner in the Catalan regional government.

The phrase was a reminder of two things: first, that the People’s Party was prepared to change its interpretation of ETA’s reliability as a source of information about its own actions depending on the circumstances; and, secondly, it had fought a significant part of the election on the issue of ETA. This had been the most brutal and divisive part of a bare-knuckle People’s Party election campaign. There had been repeated attempts to paint the Socialists as weak and woolly. Nationalist and separatist parties, meanwhile, were presented as, at least morally, swimming in the same gutter as ETA. It had widened still further the chasm that opened up under Aznar between his own side and the rest of the political spectrum. That, in turn, had set some commentators talking, once more, about that historically spine-chilling phenomenon of las dos Españas.

Under Aznar, the People’s Party had been immensely successful against ETA. Police action had reduced it to a shell of its former self. Aznar could have campaigned on his great feat of reducing ETA to an increasingly insignificant rump. He went, instead, several steps further. ETA became an electoral cosh to bludgeon others with.

The previous weeks had been a reminder that, well before George W. Bush made terrorism a major part of a political campaign, José María Aznar had discovered it for himself. Not surprisingly, Aznar was Bush’s most fervent European ally – even more so than Britain’s Tony Blair. He had backed war in Iraq in what was, depending on your point of view, an act of considerable political courage or of immense stupidity. Polls showed more than 80 per cent of the country disagreed. Aznar balked at sending troops to invade Iraq. As soon as the first part of that war was over, however, he had sent enough troops to make Spain one of the biggest forces on the ground after the US and Britain. They wore the cross of Santiago, otherwise known as ‘the Moorslayer’, on their uniforms. Going on about ETA had, deliberately or not, been a useful way of diverting attention from his unpopular, unilateral decision to go to Iraq.

I reached Madrid late on the morning of the train bombings to find this noisy city in a state of stunned silence. Streets were eerily empty. Everything seemed dulled. I saw the charred carcasses of trains, the fire officers still extracting bodies from the mangled wreckage. The occasional carload of people with shocked, pallid faces drove around in circles as they sought news of the missing. There was weeping, hysteria and anger outside the hospitals.

The cavernous IFEMA exhibition hall was turned into an impromptu morgue because its refrigerated air could stop bodies decomposing. Forensic scientists and doctors did a macabre jigsaw puzzle, trying to match the body parts of the 191 dead. It was a difficult task. They began thinking they had a dozen more bodies than they ended up with. The victims’ families sat around in grim, grieving groups, waiting for Dr Corral and his colleagues to call them to view the dead.

The government’s loud insistence that it had been an ETA attack reached full volume that first day. A motion was forced through the United Nations in New York, blaming the Basque terrorists. Spanish embassies were instructed ‘to make the most of every opportunity encountered to confirm ETA’s responsibility’.

There were other spill-overs too. In my local greengrocers the hatred was palpable. Accusing fingers pointed not just north to the Basque Country, but east to Catalonia. ‘They will be happy about this in Catalonia,’ said one client. It was as if Catalans were synonymous with the violence generated by a Basque Country that lay a thousand kilometres away on the other side of Spain. It was also a sign of how deep the divisions in Spain had become over the previous few years. Two days later a row between a policeman’s wife and sixty-one-year-old baker Ángel Berroeta, who refused to put up an anti-ETA sign in his bakery window in Pamplona, would see the policeman and his son burst into the baker’s shop and shoot him dead. Berroeta was a victim of the hysteria that the government’s response helped provoke.

An honest and responsible reply from the government would have required it to admit doubt. With the red rag of ETA dancing in front of their noses and three days to go before an election, that was not possible. Doubt was summarily banished.

Spaniards were getting used to the virulence with which Aznar’s government defended the indefensible. Aznar had been absolute in his insistence that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. His reaction to previous disasters had been to retreat into defensiveness or denial. When the Prestige oil tanker had gone down off the coast of Galicia a year earlier, the government had assured everyone that the oil would not be swept onto Spanish beaches. It would later take months to clean them. When sixty-two Spanish United Nations peacekeepers died in a rickety, Yak-42 Ukrainian charter plane that crashed into a Turkish mountain on their way home from Afghanistan, the government ferociously denied that thirty bodies had been wrongly identified by Spanish military doctors. Eventually, all would have to be exhumed except those who, mistakenly and against their real families’ wishes, had been cremated. An aggressive bunker mentality had become a mark of the Aznar government.

Later that afternoon, as I was hammering out my own, written version of the day’s events, the telephone rang. It was the spokes-person’s office at Aznar’s Moncloa Palace headquarters, calling out of the blue. The woman at the other end of the phone, who I knew, had been instructed to give me the reasons why the government was convinced it was ETA. These included: that ETA had planned to attack trains before; that the explosives used were of a kind it had previously used; and, lastly, that ETA did not always give warnings before its attacks. The first two seemed good arguments, though it later turned out that the police knew by now that Titadyn had not, in fact, been used. The last excuse, an attempt to head off the Batasuna arguments that ETA did not attack randomly, smacked of panic. Of course ETA did not always give warnings. How else could it have killed 800 people over thirty years? The call rang warning bells. The government not only thought it was ETA. Its cold-calling and panicky arguments showed it wanted, or even needed, everyone else to think so too.

Within a few minutes, however, the tale began to unravel. News came on the radio about the van that doorman Luis Garrudo had reported to the police. It contained copper detonators of a kind not used by ETA. There was also a Koranic tape. Doubt was no longer reasonable. It was actively required.

The next day, however, with forty-eight hours until the voting stations opened, Aznar and Acebes continued to spin the ETA line. The prime minister insisted Acebes had been right to blame the Basque group. ‘There was no reason to think that it was not the same lot who had tried before, and there still is not,’ Aznar said.

That evening, Acebes compounded his mistake further. ‘There is no reason, at the moment, for ETA not to be the main line of investigation,’ he insisted. Mariano Rajoy, the People’s Party candidate taking over from Aznar, told interviewers from the El Mundo newspaper that he was ‘morally convinced’ it was ETA. Moral conviction seemed the strangest, and least trustworthy, argument of all. Where were the facts? There was still no smoking gun in ETA’s hands.

More than a million people packed the centre of Madrid that night to demonstrate against the attacks, despite steady rainfall. Most walked, or stood in the choked streets, silently. Only one phrase seemed to bring the protesters together. ‘It is not raining, Madrid is weeping!’ someone said. The great rift, however, was already opening up. ‘¡ETA no! ¡ETA no!’ read some banners. ‘Otegi, cabrón, súbete al vagón’, ‘Otegi, you bastard, get yourself into the railway carriage,’ some chanted. Or, joining together, in order, peaceful Catalan separatists, pro-ETA Basques and Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist party leader in Catalonia, they cried: ‘Rovira, Otegi, Maragall, They negotiate, we die.’ Zapatero found himself confronted by demonstrators loudly protesting at his party’s alleged softness on ETA. But the old anti-war signs calling for ‘Paz’, ‘Peace’, were also there – blaming Aznar for making Spain a target. Some shouted ‘¡Aznar asesino!’ By the end of the demonstration there were loud cries of what was to become the angry, resounding question of the next 36 hours: ‘¿Quién ha sido? ¿Quién ha sido?’, ‘Who was it? Who was it?’

State television TVE, a faithful slave to whichever government is in power, ignored those who protested against Aznar or war. It zoomed in on the anti-ETA signs. Later it programmed a documentary about the February 2000 ETA murder of Basque Socialist leader Fernando Buesa and his bodyguard, Jorge Díaz Elorza. Buesa’s family protested at what it saw as cynical use of his death by the People’s Party. ‘We cannot remain silent when, in such an artful form, attempts are made to make the truth another casualty of this barbarity and, less so, when they try to make electoral use of the memory of two terrorist victims.’ But the People’s Party had decided, long before, that ETA’s victims somehow ‘belonged’ to them.

The divisions that, over the next days, would make one friend’s grandmother recall the frightening, hate-filled weeks of 1936 when the Civil War broke out, were out in the open.

Across Spain, the demonstrations were repeated. Eleven million people, a quarter of the country, reportedly took to the streets. Figures on marches like this are routinely exaggerated but this was, once more, an outpouring of that great Spanish virtue – solidaridad, solidarity. The splits, however, were obvious across the country. Tension ran high in those places already angry with Aznar. In the Catalan capital of Barcelona, Socialists and People’s Party leaders refused to walk together. Barceloneses, whose newspapers and Catalan-language television broadcasters had been more sceptical about the ETA line than their Madrid counterparts, had shouted ‘¡No a la guerra!’ – ‘No to war!’ Deputy Prime Minister Rodrigo Rato was forced to take refuge from the angry crowd in a car park. ‘It [the demonstration] left me worried. I saw scenes of tension and intolerance … more appropriate to a divided society than that of a display of unity,’ José Antich, the editor of Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper, said the next day. In Bilbao, Basque nationalists walked separately from non-nationalists.

While Spain marched, police were already tying up the Islamist connection. The clues came from the trains themselves. Three bombs had failed to explode. Two were blown up on site. The bag containing the other, however, was not recognised immediately. It was taken, along with other abandoned luggage, to the mass morgue set up at Madrid’s exhibition centre. It remained unclaimed by the families there, so it was sent back to a police station near Santa Eugenia railway station – where it had first come from. It was not until a police officer there opened the bag, that the key element of the future investigation was found. Two wires were sticking up from a mobile phone and a detonator. This was bomb number 13. A courageous bomb disposal expert called Pedro Lorente drove it to a nearby park and defused it. The mechanism for detonating the bombs, it was discovered, had been the mobile phone alarms. These had triggered the detonators, blowing up the twelve kilos of explosives and scattering the shrapnel packed around them.

Lorente was able to extract the mobile phone. Its SIM card led police to the wholesalers and people they had sold on to. Moroccans Jamal Zougam, Mohamed Bekkali and Mohammed Chaoui, all in their early thirties, jointly ran a locutorio, a shop equipped with cheap-rate telephone lines for calling abroad. Their shop was in the central Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapiés – a melting pot of the capital’s immigrants. They also sold, on the side, mobile phones which they illegally altered so they could be used without payment.

Only a teenage petty crook, who acted as a messenger boy bringing the explosives to Madrid from Asturias and returning with the hashish that helped pay for it, was the first person convicted. But two dozen people were arrested over the following weeks as the mobile phones led police towards the bombers. The night after the attacks, Bekkali had joined the protest marchers in Madrid, lighting a candle for the dead. That is what his younger sister, Charafa, told a journalist from the Guardian, Owen Bowcott, when he went to visit their well-off, carpet-trading family in Tangier that week. ‘His voice was a bit taut,’ she recalled. ‘He said he had been on the march against terrorism and lit one of the candles. He said he felt very sad for the victims. He was arrested that evening.’

On the surface, at least, this was exceptionally good police work. It should have made Aznar’s government look good. Instead it made it look foolish.

Even then, however, nothing was clear. If the phones used in the attacks were supplied by Moroccans, it did not necessarily mean they were the bombers. ‘They were nice people, very friendly,’ the Spanish man who sold crisps, nuts, sweets and dried fruits in a tiny shop right in front of the locutorio told me. ‘They weren’t fundamentalists,’ a couple of their Lavapiés immigrant friends swore.

Zougam was, in fact, well-known to police. Police in Madrid, acting at the request of a French judge, had raided the Zougam family apartment in 2001. They found videos of his Moroccan friends fighting as mujahedin in Dagestan, Russia. Also, in a clear sign that he was, at the very least, intrigued by the fundamentalist creed, they also found a videotape containing an interview with Osama bin Laden and several books on global jihad. Zougam’s address book included the numbers of several men awaiting trial in Spanish prisons on al-Qaida-related charges.

Zougam had moved from Tangier, where two of the passengers killed in Madrid on 11 March also came from, with his mother, Aicha, and older half-brother, Mohammed Chaoui, in 1983. He was ten and an early immigrant at a time when Madrid and Spain were still remarkably homogenous places. Back in the Tangier kasbah, however, he had aroused suspicions on family visits home. He sometimes stayed with the Benayiche family, alleged members of the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain (GICM). This was part of the Salifiya Jihadia movement. It had been blamed for the suicide bomb attacks which had killed forty-five people, including many at the Casa de España social club, in Casablanca in May 2003. Through the Benayiches, there were links to Al-Qaida. One brother, Abdellah, had been killed by an American bomb at the Tora Bora cave complex as Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaida fighters fled from Afghanistan. Another, Abdelaziz, was under arrest in Spain for alleged membership of an al-Qaida cell. The third, Salaheddine, was in a Moroccan prison for the Casablanca bombings. They possibly took Zougam to see their fiery preacher Mohammed Fizazi, who was given to urging the ‘assassination of the impious’. Fizazi is now serving thirty years in jail for the Casablanca attacks. Under interrogation Fizazi allegedly declared: ‘I love death as much as the impious love life.’ It was a phrase that would reappear in the mouths of the Madrid bombers, who did not consider their campaign to be over.

The three arrested men, like many of those picked up after them, had never looked the part. Zougam wore jeans and had a fashionable haircut. Bekkali was a graduate from Tetouan University. A Real Madrid fanatic, he owned a David Beckham shirt. ‘He seemed a completely normal person. He eyed up girls and laughed and played with everyone. He smoked cigarettes, went to the beach, kissed girls on their cheek. Islamists don’t do those kind of things,’ a cousin told Bowcott. ‘You would never think he would be capable of this terrible act, this crime. Those bombs were acts of terrorism, not Islam. It’s a sick ideology.’

News of the arrests broke late on the day after the bombings. By the next morning, Saturday, all Spain knew that three Moroccans had been arrested and that at least one had fundamentalist connections. Political parties had suspended campaigning straight after the bombings. Saturday was, in any case, the official ‘day of reflection’. Voters were meant to ponder their choice. Politicians were banned from campaigning.

During the day, however, the murmur of discontent grew to a roar. Opposition politicians had already let it be known they thought the government was lying, deliberately sticking to the ETA line to win votes. A new political phenomenon was born that day – the instant text message demonstration. Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant. The first pásalo had landed on my mobile the evening of the attack. It simply said: ‘A candle in the window for the dead. Pásalo.’

On the day of reflection the messages became frantic, political and angry. By mid-afternoon, my partner’s phone had received this one: ‘Aznar smelling of roses? They call this the day of reflection and Urdaci (head of news at state broadcaster RTVE) is working? Today, the 13th, at 6 p.m. PP HQ 13 Génova St. without parties. Silence for the truth. pásalo!’

Demonstrations are illegal the day before an election. But this was a call for one. In the space of a few hours, the messages flew from phone to phone. The internet picked them up. E-mails and message boards amplified the call. New protests were hurriedly called outside PP offices across the country.

At ten minutes to six I took up position outside the PP’s Génova Street headquarters. There were a dozen or more journalists and photographers there and a handful of people, no more than twenty, hanging about. At six on the dot, a protest demonstration materialised out of thin air. Suddenly there were fifty, then 100, then 200 people gathered. The police ordered them to move on. They refused. The police demanded their ID cards. The demonstrators held them out to the TV cameras. ‘We want the truth!’ they shouted. ‘¿Quién ha sido? ¿Quién ha sido?’, ‘Who was it? Who was it?’, began the chant. As the minutes ticked by hundreds more people arrived. Soon there were a thousand, then two thousand, then the street was blocked and the riot squad vans were arriving – always too late for the protesters as their numbers grew.

A small, determined woman was standing in the middle of the road, ignoring police orders to stay on one side and shouting at passing cars, many of which honked in support. I went up to ask her some questions. ‘We are just people who want the truth. Our pain has been caused by Aznar’s support for Bush,’ she said.

Within half an hour, 5,000 people were sitting on the road chanting: ‘We want the truth, before we vote!’ Another chant was ‘¡Vuestras guerras, nuestros muertos!’, ‘Your war, our dead!’ Madrid’s notoriously baton-happy riot police looked on, unable to do more than prepare to stop a full-scale assault on the PP building, where only a few lights burned. The blue vans kept tearing up and disgorging their cargo of helmet-and-visored police officers. If the demonstrators had wanted to riot, they could have done. I expected violence and half wished I had one of those helmets disguised as baseball hats that news agency journalists seem to get these days. But nothing happened. The police did not charge. Nor did the demonstrators. One part of the text message was roundly ignored, however. There was no silence. The crowd howled.

A man walking a large, well-groomed dog started arguing furiously with the demonstrators. He was a university professor who, he told me, had been jailed by Franco. He was livid. ‘They [the left] are doing this because they know that tomorrow they will lose the elections,’ he fumed. The professor’s prediction was one of the worst made that day. He was one of the few people who dared to predict anything at all. Most people thought the Socialists were going to win extra votes, but nobody was prepared to say how many – or whether they might oust the People’s Party. Only at Aznar’s Moncloa Palace residence and at the headquarters of the two main parties – where a select few had access to private polling – did people know that the professor’s prediction was totally wrong.

The demonstrators kept going all night. It was remarkable, given the tension and the anger, that there was no violence. Spaniards, anyway, do not go in for riots. The only exception has been the Basque Country’s angry, organised, and systematically riotous, separatist radical youths. Later the protesters would move to the Puerta del Sol – Madrid’s answer to Piccadilly Circus or Times Square – and would wander loudly around the streets until the small hours of the morning.

It seemed nothing could add more tension to the situation. But, as protesters wandered the streets, the drama reached new heights. Telemadrid, the capital’s television station, received an anonymous call. The caller said that a videotape had been left in a waste-paper bin outside what Madrileños called the ‘mezquita de la M-30’, the shiny, Saudi-built mosque perched above the city’s ten-lane M-30 inner ring road. Police picked up the tape. When they put it into a video machine, they were greeted by the sight of three machine-gun-toting, masked men. They looked like they had come from a Hamas suicide bomber’s farewell tape in Palestine.

‘You want life and we want death,’ they had said. It was the mantra of angry, violent Islamists – an almost exact replica of what the imam Fizazi had reportedly said in Morocco.

The delivery of the tape was extraordinary timing. It drove the nation’s political blood pressure to coronary-attack levels, and it did so just hours before Spaniards went to vote. Nobody who stepped into a polling booth the following day could have had any doubt about who had attacked Madrid.

Or could they? As Spaniards voted the following morning, Foreign Minister Ana Palacio was interviewed by Sir David Frost on BBC television’s Breakfast with Frost. ‘The idea that ETA might be behind [it] is still strong in the investigation,’ she claimed.

There are many versions of why Spaniards voted the way they did, none of them provable. Zapatero likes to say he was going to win anyway – despite opinion polls which gave the People’s Party a five to seven point lead days before the bombings. Spanish polls are notoriously bad, but that is clearly absurd. The People’s Party blames the illegal demonstrations and rumour-mongering in the left-wing press. Others on the right see the old dark forces of Felipe González’s corrupt Socialists and their friends in the police at work in the shadows. Right-wing commentators in the US and Great Britain saw straight-forward cowardice. They claimed Spaniards had voted out of fear, especially after Zapatero stuck to his long-term pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. ‘Neville Chamberlain, en Español,’ said one Wall Street Journal opinion piece, commissioned from an angry Spanish right-winger, on Zapatero. A few days earlier his nickname had been ‘Bambi’, because of his look of doe-eyed innocence. Most reasonable commentators, however, point to only four definite conclusions: the bombs produced a larger than expected turn-out at the polls; Zapatero would probably not have won without them; the People’s Party would not have lost had it not supported war in Iraq and sent troops there; its huge error in insisting that ETA had planted the bombs drove the final nail into its coffin.

Spaniards have a history of rebelling against leaders who take them into wars they do not like. If they feel viscerally suspicious of war, one should not be surprised. Many countries have experienced its horrors. Few, however, are so convinced of its futility. As a child in 1960s and 1970s Britain, I grew up with the moral certainty that a previous generation of Britons – that of my schoolteachers – had fought a just war against Adolf Hitler. If the Auschwitz gas chambers proved they were right to fight, General Franco was proof to my Spanish friends that their grandfathers had butchered one another senselessly. The colourless decades of his rule hung heavily over the past, like a punishment for the bloodbath.

Spain’s experience of war has been better painted than it has been written. The few hundred metres of central Madrid that embrace both the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía modern arts centre, contain, within them, some of the most telling pictorial denunciations of war ever painted or etched. In his painting The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill and his Disasters of War series of etchings Goya tells of the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic rule in 1808. ‘Yo lo ví’– ‘I saw it,’ Goya scratched onto one of his copperplates of killing, rape and pillage. In the Reina Sofía, Picasso’s huge, grey-blue Guernica is populated with terrified mothers, dead children, maddened animals and dismembered bodies. It evokes a world numbed by terror.

The horror of Guernica, blitzed by the German Luftwaffe on Franco’s behalf in 1937, was real, and more so because it was innovative. An ancient human fear was turned into reality. Death rained from the sky. A local artist once showed me around the rebuilt town, telling me his memories of the fateful day. He had run for the hills as a boy and watched Guernica burn. What he saw was the invention of blanket incendiary bombing of civilian targets. What was shocking in 1937 became, sadly, commonplace within a decade. Guernica, and nearby Durango, were the experimental laboratories for the carpet bombing of Coventry or Dresden and, ultimately, for the nuclear wastelands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

War played its part, but the most likely reason for the 2004 vote was the People’s Party’s obstinacy in insisting on the one version of events that would help them politically – that ETA was to blame. A post-voting poll showed one in five Spaniards had that uppermost in their minds when they voted. It was enough to swing it for Rodríguez Zapatero.

In the end, it was not Al-Qaida that brought Aznar’s People’s Party down. It was ETA. Or, rather, it was Aznar’s personal obsession with the separatist group. Under his guidance, the People’s Party had been drawn into defining itself in terms of ETA or, rather, in terms of its anti-ETA-ness. If ETA was absolute evil, the People’s Party saw itself as its only true opponent. It was, by extension, its noble, shining opposite.

The People’s Party, and Aznar in particular, was so blinded by that idea of itself that, when the bombs went off, it was as if a prophecy had come true. ETA had shown its full vileness, further justifying Aznar’s firm stance and shaming those he saw as appeasers. The People’s Party had no need to lie to Spaniards. It was already fully programmed to fool itself. As its thesis weakened, it instinctively dug its grave deeper. Little wonder Spaniards voted it out.

Ten days later, Aznar, who was still caretaker prime minister, appeared on television for a rare live interview. It had, presumably, been at his own request. For the first time ever, he began to talk about himself as a victim, though a surviving one, of terrorism. A roadside bomb in Madrid had, on 19 April 1995, blown his armour-plated car halfway across the road and caused a nearby building to collapse. Aznar, then the opposition leader, insisted on walking to a nearby clinic and remained icy-cool in the aftermath. ‘I recall the terrible smell of explosive powder, my face was scorching, my hair was singed and, as the whole place was thick with smoke, my first reaction was to feel my own body with my hands, to see if I was injured. On finding that nothing was missing, I asked the driver and bodyguard if they were all right,’ he said later. Aznar, that day, showed both courage and cool. His advisers gloated. ETA, they said, had just blasted him into the Moncloa.

I had always been impressed, however, by his refusal to make political capital out of his status as the survivor of an ETA attack. It was a card he could have played many times, but did not – until it made no difference. Suddenly, stripped of power and personally responsible for his party’s defeat, he seemed to be seeking sympathy. Not that he was admitting he had done anything wrong. He, and his party, still refuse to admit that.

Long before terrorism became one of the dominant preoccupations of global politics, it was the personal bugbear of José María Aznar. It overlapped, at least in his mind, with his other main dislike, Basque and Catalan separatism. Aznar always had a black-and-white view of terrorism. The only thing negotiable with ETA, his party liked to say, was ‘the colour of the bars on their cells’. Terrorism was not a political problem, but a moral one. Terrorists were evil – and that was all there was to it. They had to be defeated. Little wonder that, even before 9/11, he saw eye-to-eye with George W. Bush. On a first, and somewhat fraught, visit to Europe, the US president made Madrid his first stop. Aznar blushed with pleasure when Bush rewarded him by pledging ‘our government is committed to stand side by side with the Spanish government as it battles terrorism here in Spain.’ He even dared to become Spain’s first-ever out-and-out Atlanticist premier. General Franco had signed deals to give the US bases in Spain. He had done so, however, more out of geopolitical, Cold War expediency than out of admiration for the country that humiliated Spain in 1898. ‘It causes me some anxiety to see the world in the hands of the North Americans,’ Franco once said. ‘They are very childish.’

Fighting ETA’s terrorism was an obviously noble cause. It did not occur to me that there might be something personal about Aznar’s determination until, during his term in office, I went to the Moncloa Palace to interview him. I did this twice, spending an hour with the man on each occasion in a room decorated with tapestries made at Madrid’s Real Fábrica de Tapices from tapestry cartoons drawn by Goya. The first time I met him, he walked into the room in a jolly, back-slapping sort of a way – a man determined to make a friendly impression. He pretty soon returned to the dour, serious individual he really was. On one of these visits I asked him about the ETA attack against him. ‘Son gafes del oficio,’ he said. ‘It is a downside of the job.’ It was a good reply. Then I told him I had met a lot of ETA victims – those wounded in attacks or those who had lost loved ones. All had told me that each fresh attack felt to them like a reliving of the first, definitive attack. Did he feel like that?

Aznar’s reaction has stuck in my mind ever since. It is not what he said, trotting out a line about how it was important to maintain a calm, clear head, but the strange look he shot in my direction. When I said I had met lots of victims – which I had, as part of a book project – it was as though I had intruded on a private domain. Aznar, dubbed el Sequerón because of his dry, dour personality, is not the sort of person to let emotion show. It was the first time, in fact, that I had seen him at all ruffled. It was as though I could not possibly understand. I felt I was being told, in fact, that it was none of my business. It was impossible to guess what psychological cogs were turning behind the Aznar facade. This was, however, clearly not a run-of-the-mill political topic for him.

I had approved of Aznar when he was first in power. He got rid of a Socialist government that, because of its multiple corruption scandals, had long forfeited the right to govern. He was also the first professed right-winger to be democratically elected to power since 1934. He showed Spain that the political right was not just Franco, but that it could exist perfectly well in a democracy – that, in fact, it was a necessary part of one.

With no absolute majority in his first term in parliament, Aznar had also had to broker deals with Catalan and Basque nationalists of Convergència i Unió and the Basque Nationalist Party, respectively. They supported him in parliament, thus showing not only that they are conservatives at heart but also that the ‘nationalist’ centre and the ‘nationalist’ periphery could get along and make the country work. It was, again, something many had thought impossible. His rowdy supporters, believing opinion poll predictions of an absolute majority, had gathered outside the party headquarters on election night and shouted: ‘¡Pujol, enano, habla castellano!’, ‘Pujol [the Catalan nationalist regional premier], you midget, speak Spanish!’

Aznar kept his hands out of the till, and, with a few exceptions, made sure his party did too. He was rewarded, at the 2000 elections, with an absolute majority. Aznar, the Sequerón, shed tears as he waved at the crowd of supporters in the street. It was a strange sight. This man had always been accused of lacking charisma, of being unloved even by those who voted for him. There was more emotion behind the Aznar facade than met the eye.

Years before the September 11 attacks in the United States, Aznar had been ploughing an unfashionably hard line on terrorism. It was, he said, his first priority. He would be tough. Although he played host to Tony Blair and his family on a holiday in Doñana National Park in the days after the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland was signed, there could be no such deal with him. Each People’s Party councillor killed by ETA was another twist on the screw that tightened his resolve.

The funerals he attended cannot have been easy. I once sat in an apartment in San Sebastián, talking to a young, attractive woman while a three-year-old boy called Javier rushed about in his dressing gown playing boyish games. Ana Iríbar’s story was yet another tale of tragedy in the Basque Country. She was the widow of Gregorio Ordóñez. He was a city councillor shot at point blank range, in front of three lunch companions, as he ate lunch in La Cepa. This restaurant sits on the short Calle 31 de Agosto in the old part of San Sebastián, where ETA has now killed three times. One of the assassins had walked down the street from his own parents’ restaurant. The killers walked straight up to him and put a bullet in his head. When I met his wife, Ana, she had been widowed for barely a year. But, recently a father myself, what stuck in my mind was the little boy. Those sort of thoughts must have been a constant in Aznar’s political life.

There was one ETA death, however, that intrigued me especially. The victim’s name was Margarita González Mansilla. She had been born seventy-three years earlier in Badajoz but had migrated to Madrid and raised a family in a modest little house. When she died there were no mass marches. Nobody took to the streets. Her death, three months after she went into coma, occupied only a few paragraphs in the newspaper. Even that much space was due to the fact that the bomb had been the one that, on 19 April 1995, had been aimed at Aznar. I always wondered how much her death – which had, after all, meant to be that of Aznar himself – might have affected him. It could, of course, have left him cold, but somehow I doubted that.

Aznar’s obsession with ETA grew. The police worked harder, the US pledged some kind of help – though numerous government officials I spoke to were unable to say how. The French police, above all, cracked down on them. By the time he left office, ETA had, for the first time, gone almost a whole year without managing to kill. It was not defeated, but it was close to it.

Aznar’s friendship with non-violent Basque nationalists soured as soon as he gained an absolute majority. The old pacts fell apart, or at least became inoperative. The nationalists moved in the opposite direction. They ate up some of ETA’s territory by loudly defending the right to self-determination and threatening to hold a referendum of their own. This was an attempt to split the difference, and push ETA and its Batasuna ally off the political map. It was also scrupulously democratic. For Aznar, it was close to treason. He even legislated so that he could lock up the Basque regional premier if he did call a referendum.

Spanish literature has provided us with the greatest honourable fool of all times. Don Quixote de La Mancha, that ‘light and mirror of all knight-errantry’ who is now 400 years old, was a man obsessed by ‘the grievances he proposed to redress, the wrongs he intended to rectify, the exorbitance to correct, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge’.

Aznar, with his willingness to get into a fight and refusal to budge on matters he perceived to be of honour, had more than a few Quixotic characteristics himself. The temptation to draw parallels between Don Quixote turning windmills into giants and Aznar, after the Madrid bombings, turning Al-Qaida into ETA are almost irresistible, though there is nothing humorous about the latter. Don Quixote was deaf to Sancho Panza’s warnings before he charged the windmills. ‘One may easily see that you are not versed in the business of adventures: they are giants; and, if you are afraid, get aside and pray, whilst I engage them in a fierce and unequal combat,’ he said before charging at them and being knocked cold by a windmill sail.

Aznar’s faithful steed was not a horse called Rocinante, but a government apparatus run on presidential lines. It gave him the results he wanted. Where he was going to see ETA, it too had trained itself to see ETA. That particular trick was not new. British and American intelligence has done the same thing in Iraq, ‘seeing’ weapons of mass destruction that politicians insisted must be there – when they were not.

Aznar had already outdone both Bush and Blair in his assurances that the weapons existed. His stance then could also have been mouthed by the knight-errant of La Mancha. ‘What I say is true, and you will see it presently,’ Don Quixote said when convinced that a group of monks were really wicked enchanters. That was also the Aznar approach to the 11-M bombings.

The train bombing story did not end on 14 March. For the bombers had not gone away. Its final chapter was written four weeks later. By that stage the bombers had shown signs of being active once more. An attempt had been made to blow up a high-speed train on its way to Seville. A second failed attempt targeted the high-speed line to Zaragoza.

But police were getting closer. Eventually the bombers were discovered in the dormitory town of Leganés. Police surrounded their apartment. A gun battle started. Then a special-operations squad was called in to storm the place. It was greeted by a huge explosion that blew out the walls of the apartment building, killing a police officer. The seven men inside had stood in a circle and exploded their remaining dynamite. Their bodies – or body bits – were scattered amongst the ruins. One had to be fished out of the building’s communal swimming pool. Seven corpses were eventually identified.

One belonged to an Allekama Lamari, a violent Islamist who had been mistakenly released from jail because of a bureaucratic mix-up between Spain’s two senior courts, the National Court and the Supreme Court. Communications between the two courts had, apparently, broken down – though they are barely 100 metres apart. The other bombers were a mixture of petty crooks, drug dealers and pious university graduates.

The profile of the Madrid bombers was depressingly low-life. They were freelance radicals, only loosely linked to Al-Qaida, but determined to follow the exhortations of Osama bin Laden.

The gang had a rural hideaway. It was a one-storey house in the countryside outside the town of Chinchón, just twenty-five miles from the capital. The bombers had held a barbecue party at their little retreat a couple of weeks after the Madrid bombings. They had stored their dynamite here and activated the mobile phones that would set them off. Neighbours remembered one of them, a hashish trafficker called Jamal Ahmidan, because he rode motorbikes and would appear with a couple of Spanish girls who had tattoos and piercings.

Spain, despite Aznar’s obsession with ETA terrorism, turned out to have a lively black market in Goma 2 and other explosives used in the mining industry of the northern Asturias region. Here, it seems, police missed warnings about the traffickers. The dynamite was reportedly paid for with just 6,000 euros and a quantity of Moroccan hashish.

‘It turns out that all this was done by a handful of petty crooks who were also police informers, but that police did not have the faintest idea of what was going on,’ commentator Victoria Prego wrote in El Mundo newspaper. ‘The judges must now reveal … the full degree of ham-fistedness and carelessness that we are discovering.’

Aznar’s government, obsessed by ETA but rattling the Islamist cage with its vocal support for war in Iraq, had been looking the wrong way.

A parliamentary inquiry was set up. The politicians, however, were more interested in rowing about whether the government had lied or whether the Socialists had brought protesters out onto the street than what had gone wrong. Newspaper editors, even foreign correspondents, were, initially, placed on the list of witnesses to be quizzed. One morning I opened El País to find that I myself had been called as a witness – though the commission members later cancelled all the journalists.

The inquiry became a laughing stock. Political witnesses competed with one another to see how long they could go without stopping, even to eat. Acebes and Aznar both did more than ten hours. Zapatero lasted almost fifteen.

The inquiry was evidence of the divided Spain inherited from the Aznar years. The People’s Party sat in one corner uselessly clinging to the idea that ETA must have had something to do with it. The rest – the left and the regional nationalists or separatists – tried to prove that Aznar had deliberately and knowingly lied. Aznar, in the commission, gave wind to the conspiracy theories. He talked about connections between ETA and Islamists. The ‘intellectual authors’, he added mysteriously, were ‘not in remote deserts or far-off mountains’.

Zapatero, in turn, claimed Aznar had orchestrated ‘a massive deceit’. Both theories are now engraved in stone on each side’s version of events. ‘The political wounds from March 11 are so deep that we may have to wait a generation for them to heal,’ El Mundo columnist Lucía Méndez concluded. The commission of inquiry itself split along the now depressingly familiar lines of the Two Spains when drawing up conclusions. It blamed Aznar for ‘manipulating’ and ‘twisting’ the truth. The People’s Party representatives voted against. The contrast with the US Joint Inquiry report into the September 11 attacks made the whole affair seem even more shameful.

The victims and their families, meanwhile, looked on in absolute alarm and disgust. Pilar Manjón, who lost her nineteen-year-old student son on one of the trains, accused the inquiry members of behaving like kids in a school playground. The victims, she told them, had become a political football for them to kick around. ‘What have you been laughing at? Who are you trying to cheer on? What victories are you celebrating?’ she asked.

It took a while for the technicians to repair a videotape found amongst the rubble where the seven bombers had blown themselves up in Leganés. When the tape was finally ready, investigators heard a name some may have recalled from school history lessons.

‘The brigades that are in Al Andalus … will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Bin Ziyad,’ the three heavily armed, white-robed figures threatened in one of the undamaged segments. This was none other than the Berber who had sailed his troops across the Straits of Gibraltar in 711. ‘Remember the Spanish crusade against the Muslims, the expulsion from Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,’ the bombers added, claiming Spain was Muslim by right and Christian only by force. They, like bin Laden and Aznar, saw an age-old conflict simply entering its newest phase.

Spain now has several hundred thousand Muslim immigrants. Many work in the intensive, plastic-tented vegetable plantations of Almería, in the south-east. There, the joint head of Spain’s Islamic Commission, Spanish convert Mansur Escudero, told me that ordinary Muslims thought of Al Andalus as history.

‘To argue that this country is impious and in need of a Muslim Reconquista is barbarous,’ he said. The half-dozen Moroccans who stepped out from midday prayer at the Al Tawba mosque, a one-room outfit at Vícar, near Almería, pointed out that Al Andalus had a reputation for religious and ethnic tolerance. ‘Al Andalus was a common project between Christians, Muslims and Jews,’ they said.

Bin Laden would not agree. Nor would Aznar.

The arrival of Islamist terrorism, however, seemed to bring an unexpected bonus. For the Islamists may have sealed the fate of Spain’s home-grown terrorists, the Basque separatists of ETA. Even the most radical separatists had claimed to be sickened by the 11 March train bombings. How could they now justify meting out more of the same? As this book goes to print an already weakened ETA is thought to be involved in a secret peace process. Even if it does stop killing, however, the scars ETA leaves behind will take generations to heal. In the meantime the Basque Country remains the supreme example of Spain’s longest-running and most intractable problem. Is it really a nation? Or is it several nations squeezed into one?