At the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California, it was 5 o’clock in the afternoon but in Calzada de Calatrava, a large farming village on the parched, red-soiled plain of La Mancha, it was already 2 o’clock in the morning. The only living beasts visible in the streets were the cats, busy shredding bin bags and scattering the contents across the pavements. Candles burnt at the shrine in the hermitage of Saint Isidore, lit by elderly women seeking divine support for the village’s favourite son – film director Pedro Almodóvar.

Apart from that, the only sign of life – as the director competed for two Oscars with his film Talk to Her – was in the Círculo Agrícola, the village’s faded, if spacious, Farmers’ Club. The hat racks and polished table legs suggested this had once been the smart place to be seen in Calzada de Calatrava. Here in the public saloon where, as a boy, Almodóvar saw his first films, some forty of us had gathered to watch the ceremony. On one wall, under a vast black-and-white picture of the nearby castle where an order of medieval knights was founded, a screen had been set up. The television picture from Los Angeles was projected onto the screen, but the words being said were lost in the disastrous acoustics of the room.

We were a mixture of the young, the elderly, the curious and the drunk. Sleepily, we awaited the moment, three hours later, when the Oscar winner would be announced. A victory for Almodóvar in either of the mainstream categories for which he had been nominated (as best director or for the best original screenplay) would be the first ever of its kind for a Spanish film – and a rare tribute to a foreign-language director. His double candidacy was further proof that Almodóvar had become Spain’s new face to the world. From Hollywood to the art-house cinemas of Europe, his sometimes kitsch, often camp and almost always subversive take on Spanish life and mores was the colour-drenched new facade of the country.

His message is taken seriously. In 2005, Time magazine declared Talk to Her to be the film of the decade (so far). ‘At its simplest level, this transgressively witty film is about how a hospital orderly’s sexual obsession achieves the unlikely awakening of a comatose woman. But there’s actually nothing simple about this lovely, lightly dancing film’s reflections on all the big topics: life, death, dreams – and ballet,’ Time’s critics declared.

As the night wore on, the drunks got drunker and the rest of us got sleepier. Spaniards are generally good at holding their alcohol – they are not given to the binge-drinking, falling-over nights out of northern Europeans. Tonight, however, one or two were well over the top. One of these – another medical orderly – had decided I should be his new friend. He drew up a plastic chair and leaned over at me, his head almost resting on my shoulder. ‘We should go to the hills of the Sierra Morena to watch the sun go up,’ he suggested. ‘We can take some pork sausage with us.’

Spaniards, wherever they are, know how to stay up late. Village fiestas always last until the small hours of the morning. On fiesta nights children scamper around the streets until they drop. As the night goes on they can be seen asleep on public benches or in their parents’ arms. Spaniards have a special verb for seeing the night through until the sun rises: trasnochar, literally to cross the night. It has been a point of pride amongst my friends to occasionally link night with day and arrive at the office without having slept. An even greater point of pride is that nobody at the office should notice. In playful Andalucía, meanwhile, a decent juerga can sometimes be measured in days. Siestas, sadly, are largely a thing of the past (except where it is too hot to work in the early afternoon). It is still a mystery to me how so many Spaniards can function on so little sleep.

In Calzada de Calatrava a brave few were trying to uphold the tradition of Spanish nocturnal staying-power. The local florist, a small, formal man, recalled how Almodóvar used to come and play at his house as a boy. He was always ‘a bit special’, he said. ‘As a boy he stood out, all right. He would do things that other people didn’t do. If he thought people were ignoring him he would do some mischief to get our attention,’ he remembered. He was about to tell me a tale of some prank involving his chickens when his wife clamped a hand on his knee to shut him up. Discretion was being called for. The village’s most famous son should not be spoken of badly. Apart from that, however, few people could remember anything very much about him. He had moved away as a child and now made only occasional family visits to the old family house. His parents’ graves, however, were here. Calzada de Calatrava, as Almodóvar’s brother once put it, ‘is the sort of place where people spend their whole life saving for a decent headstone in the cemetery’.

Sitting in a moulded plastic chair for three hours, there was plenty of time to reflect on a simple conundrum. How is it that the arch-proponent of modernity in Spanish culture – a man who has triumphed around the globe – should come from such a sleepy, backward, dry and barren cultural void? The answer became apparent well before Almodóvar lifted his ‘best original screenplay’ statuette above his head shortly after 5 a.m. It was that one would do anything to escape a place like this. If ever there was a case for throwing out the old and bringing in the new, this was it.

The party folded soon after Almodóvar had lifted his statuette. I went out into the street in front of the Círculo Agrícola. Anastasio, one of the one-man-band cultural animators who are the saving grace of places like this, was rummaging around in his car boot. He pulled out three fireworks – large rockets. He lit them one by one, there in the street. They exploded above the sleeping pueblo. There were three loud bangs. I expected half of the 5,000 inhabitants to appear shouting – in anger or joy – on their balconies. Nothing, however, stirred. One newspaper reported ‘great festivities’ in Calzada de Calatrava. It obviously had not been there.

Almodóvar’s first films – with their kitsch ‘new wave’ costumes, electric colours, complex sexual relationships and relentless drug-taking – were all a reaction to this drab, hard environment. ‘It was the kind of harsh place where nobody understood sensuality, the joy of life or even the idea of colour,’ Almodóvar once explained. His mother, who plays small roles in some of his films, wore black – the once obligatory colour of mourning – for twenty years as a young woman. ‘Perhaps that is why there is so much colour in my films,’ he said. Trips to the cinema were liable to be cut short by paternal disapproval. Almodóvar’s father, who traded goods off the back of a mule, would order them out if anything too risqué appeared on screen. A family outing to see War and Peace ended after the second kiss.

‘I was not born in the right family, in the right town, in the right language or in the right moment to make movies … It’s like dreaming of being a bullfighter when you’re born in Japan or England,’ he once explained.

His pueblo upbringing, however, shaped Almodóvar’s future. ‘It allowed me to discover what I didn’t want to be, the mentality I didn’t want to live with.’

When Spaniards want to refer to something, or someone, as backward, they often say they are ‘de pueblo’, ‘from the village’. Village life means old-fashioned values, hardship and lack of education. It also means the suffocating atmosphere and intense rivalries of a place where everybody watches everybody else. The pueblo is one of those things that not just Almodóvar, but Spain as a whole, in its headlong rush into modernity, has been desperate to leave behind. His early films, the writer Maruja Torres said, represented exactly that. ‘It is a synthesis of what we want to leave behind, and what we want to have,’ she said.

Flight from the countryside has been the biggest revolution in Spanish life over the past century. Hundreds of villages have, in fact, been abandoned altogether. Many more have just one or two families left in them. The killer blow has often been provided by electricity at a neighbouring village. That has been enough to force out the last few residents of those places it had not got to – who have gone and plugged themselves into the grid at the other village.

The process of decline is all too familiar. First the young families go, then the primary school closes. This is followed soon after by the shop and – the death blow – the bar. Mayors in some remote rural communities have started importing Latin American immigrants in an attempt to stop themselves disappearing off the map. They have paid for whole families to fly from, say, Argentina to underpopulated Teruel. Some one hundred villages most under threat – mainly in rural Galicia, the highlands of Valencia, the bleak, harsh Maestrazgo hills of Teruel, or the slopes of the Pyrenees mountains in Huesca – have even formed a club to seek new occupants from abroad. It has meant reversing the time-worn flow of Spaniards towards Latin America that started in the sixteenth century.

The pueblo is the old world. The city is the new. And, for most Spaniards, new is infinitely better than old. This is something that is obvious in a hundred small things – a virtual absence of second-hand shops, for instance, or the rarity of old cars. Nowhere is it more patent, however, than in architecture. Here great new things are being built – and great old things are left to crumble.

Ask famous international architects like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry or Arata Isozaki where the best place in Europe to build exciting new buildings is, and the answer will most likely be: ‘Spain’. A vast amount of, mainly public, money has been poured into giving the international gods of architecture spectacular new contracts for spectacular new buildings across the land.

This craving for new buildings is partly due to Spain’s status as a ‘new’ country with plenty of space, new wealth and fresh needs. Even where the great architects are not at work, cities expand visibly. New motorways and high-speed-train tracks, meanwhile, roll out across the country. This is often thanks to European Union funds. There is something about the relationship between spare space and development which makes me think not of other places in Europe but, once again, of the US or Australia. For Spain has plenty of room to grow. Greater Madrid, for example, can keep expanding for dozens of miles in most directions before running into significant geographical, urban or other barriers.

The desire for great new architecture is insatiable. The bigger the name, the better: Foster has the Bilbao metro system (whose glass-clad station entrances are affectionately known as fosteritos) and Barcelona’s telecommunications tower; Rogers has Madrid’s new airport and a transformed bull-ring in Barcelona; Richard Meier has his MACBA modern art centre in Barcelona; Frank Gehry has his Bilbao Guggenheim and a giant monumental fish on Barcelona’s water front; Arata Isozaki has Barcelona’s Olympic indoor sports stadium and a museum in La Coruña; and that list does not even include the prodigious home-grown talent, and output, of Rafael Moneo, Santiago Calatrava or Enric Miralles. Calatrava, a polymath – sculptor, artist, architect and master engineer – has designed a dove-shaped airport for Bilbao, daring bridges like Seville’s Alamillo Bridge, and Valencia’s soaring complex known as the City of Arts and Sciences.

Spain is currently in a league with Japan and Holland as the new experimental laboratory of world architecture. Rogers, who does almost a quarter of his work in Spain, has called it ‘Europe’s architectural hothouse’. The can-do, even must-do, attitude in Spain amazes him. ‘[Madrid airport] is the biggest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s three times the size of [Heathrow’s] Terminal Five which is our biggest airport in Britain. We won T5 as a competition fourteen years ago and work hasn’t started yet; we won Madrid four years ago and it’s halfway up,’ he explained in one newspaper interview.

There is an essential optimism to modern Spaniards, a belief that life is always going to get better – and that it will do so at the same velocity it has acquired over the past three decades. Progress is not only unstoppable, it happens at a dizzying speed.

A recent Rogers conversation with the head of Madrid’s subway system reportedly went like this. ‘Subway man: “How many kilometres do you need?” Rogers: “Ten kilometres.” Subway man: “Ten kilometres? We guarantee one kilometre per month – ten months.” Rogers: “We need two new stations.” Subway man: “One month each – twelve months. If you want to be kind, give me fourteen months.”’ That deal eventually ran into financing problems. The subway man’s reply, however, was a sign of how used Spaniards are to building the new. Tunnelling machines are constantly at work under Barcelona and Madrid, driving through new metro and rail lines.

Cities have now started to compete to have great buildings. When Bilbao got its Guggenheim, San Sebastián, the next city along the coast, had to get its Rafael Moneo Kursaal conference centre. When La Coruña got its Arata Isozaki Museum of Mankind, neighbouring Vigo got an Aldo Rossi maritime museum. Santiago de Compostela, the other major Galician city, now awaits a Peter Eisenmann arts complex.

This love of modernity hides what Spaniards sometimes call an huida hacia delante, or ‘running away forwards’, this time in its cultural form. The facades of these ‘brave new world’ buildings hide a certain disrespect, even contempt, for the old. For these new shrines to modern architecture divert attention away from the numerous ancient churches, hermitages, monasteries, fortresses or castles that are falling down – buckling under the weight of time and the force of nature.

It is probably unfair to criticise Spain for its treatment of its historic buildings. They are so many, and so widely spread, that it is difficult to know what to do with them. Prehistoric, Greek, Roman, Muslim, Romanesque, Mudéjar, Mozárabe and Gothic buildings, or the remains of them, dot the landscape. This is a land of eight thousand castles and other fortifications and hundreds of monasteries and convents. Much of the best has been saved, if not always in the finest taste. Such a widely scattered, and rich, national heritage is a headache, however, for those whose job it is to decide what should be kept and what left to rot. Some of those buildings are in the same villages that were abandoned by their residents decades ago. Should a Romanesque church tower be saved in a village where no one lives and which only a handful of adventurous types with four-wheel-drive vehicles, trail bikes, mountain bikes or sturdy walking boots will ever visit? Does it matter if, as happened recently to the Torreón de Santis – an eleventh-century fortress in Aragón – the last remaining section of its battlements comes tumbling down? And should Spaniards care if the Romanesque paintings that were still visible on the walls of the hermitage at Alcozar, in Soria, in the 1970s have now faded out of sight, or that the building itself looks set to collapse?

This state of affairs is a delight for visitors who like discovering ruins on their own. In Soria, one of southern Europe’s most sparsely populated regions, it means one can stride through the largely unspoilt hilltop ruins of the vast tenth-century Moorish fortress of Gormaz – once reckoned to be the biggest citadel in Europe. The fortress is not on any of the main tourist routes of Spain. Nor, in fairness, has it been left to fall down completely. It is unspoilt, however, by the visitors centres, gift shops, cafeterias or any of the other paraphernalia of overgroomed ruins. Visitors may find they have the whole one-kilometre perimeter to themselves. It is an opportunity to imagine the times of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador, the legendary eleventh-century free-booting knight and mercenary. He once held this castle as it stood on the front line, changing hands continuously, between Moor and Christian. The scale of the task of conserving ancient Spain is exemplified by Gormaz. A village of just nineteen people, it also boasts the remains of a Celtic castro, a fourth-century-BC necropolis with some 1200 (Iberian) graves, a hermitage – possibly dating back to the seventh century – with medieval wall paintings and an eighteen-span Roman-origin bridge which was rebuilt in the nineteenth century. That works out at one major monument per family.

In the early twentieth century one could come here and snap up entire ruins. American and other buyers did exactly that, shipping them home stone by stone. One hermitage from nearby San Esteban de Gormaz was dismantled and shipped to Catalonia in the 1920s – though it had originally been destined for the US.

There are many examples of how, in architecture, the new gets priority over the old. So it was that Barcelona – generally one of the best conservators of its own past – managed to put up its Isozaki and Foster buildings in time for the 1992 Olympics, while the museum that was to house the world’s finest collection of Romanesque wall-paintings – as well as a wealth of Gothic and Baroque art – was not fully opened for another dozen years.

The Prado Museum in Madrid, meanwhile, is now overcoming years of chaos, neglect, leaking roofs and botched repair work. An ambitious new expansion is to see it absorb a number of neighbouring buildings. Unfortunately, this includes ensuring the virtual disappearance from public view of the cloisters of the nearby Jerónimos Church. These, though rebuilt in the nineteenth century, date back to the sixteenth century. They have now been swallowed up by a brick cube by Moneo. A campaign to leave the cloisters alone was greeted with indifference by politicians and Madrileños as a whole – in a city which can hardly claim to be bursting with sixteenth-century buildings.

When ruins are restored, Spain sometimes falls into the temptation of ‘improving’ and sanitising them. The arch-example is the Roman theatre at Sagunto, near Valencia, where the Supreme Court had to order that the ‘renovation’ – which included large amounts of spanking-new, shiny marble – be completely undone.

‘Every day we awake with another piece of architecture … left to die so that speculators can carry out, under the name of restoration, changes that are both unnecessary and irreversible,’ one specialist architect, Antonio-José Mas-Guindal, says.

Even the ‘old new’ can be swept away. One of Madrid’s landmark modern buildings, the Christmas tree-like la Pagoda of Miguel Fisac, has already been pulled down to make way for an anonymous glass office block – thus stymieing moves to make it a ‘protected’ building.

All this, perhaps, should not be surprising in a country where new houses and apartments are worth more than old ones or where moderno is always a positive adjective. New apartments in Madrid fetch 20 per cent more, per square metre, than old ones. Older apartments and houses are, anyway, almost inevitably deemed to need reforma total, complete renovation. The reason given for this is often one of ‘hygiene’. It as if there was actually something sick or infectious about the old. It is heartbreaking to see the skips of Madrid fill up with patterned 1920s cerámica hidráulica floor tiles, made from pressed concrete, old wrought-iron radiators and wooden window frames. The latter are often replaced by PVC.

The situation is even more alarming outside the major cities, in those much maligned pueblos where, thanks to the internal migration of the Franco years, most city-dwellers’ parents or grandparents came from. In Las Navas del Marqués, a relatively prosperous town in Ávila province that lives off weekend tourism from Madrid, I have watched as brick summer villas from the early half of the twentieth century are torn down to be replaced by crude, ugly apartment blocks. Town planning has failed across the country – even in Catalonia, that supposed haven of architectural and urban dignity. A Catalan friend once asked me doubtfully what I thought Catalans had, if anything, in common with other Spaniards. She obviously thought there was very little. We were walking along the seafront at Badalona, a town just north of Barcelona, so I pointed to the one-and two-storey beach-front houses that were being knocked down and replaced by gleaming new blocks of flats. Even she had to nod her head.

The eagerness with which the new is embraced has something to do with the memory, real or inherited, of poverty. Again, there is an element of huida, of flight. Old, in many minds, still equals poor.

The countryside fares little better. Many of Spain’s frequent summer fires are put down to speculators seeking building permission. With the land already burnt, the logic goes, the local town hall will be unable to find ‘environmental’ reasons for banning building. That will make the building of an urbanización of weekend chalets or the creation of an industrial estate, that much easier.

One of the greatest abuses of all was to rid Europe of what is said to be the only river on the continent that reaches the sea in a waterfall. The spectacle of the River Xallas, in Galicia, pouring from a height of 100 metres into the Atlantic, disappeared in 1986. This Galician Niagara was sacrificed to a local factory which built two dams along the course of the river. Public protest finally saw water redirected to the waterfall – but only on occasional Sundays and then only for a few hours.

Part of this love of the new is a desire to catch up. Spaniards spent the best part of two centuries looking enviously over the Pyrenees at what was happening in the rest of Europe. When a Spaniard wants to be down on his own country – or complain, in a rare burst of irony, of an old French attitude to it – he still sometimes reproduces a tired, overused phrase: ‘Africa, you know, starts at the Pyrenees.’

Suspicious Spaniards, or those whose pride is hurt by the way foreigners have written about their country, are not completely without reason. For European and anglosajón writers Spain has, until quite recently, always been ‘the other’ – a shining example of what they, themselves, are not.

Anglosajones, especially, are accused of having spent the past four hundred years putting about a version of Spain known as the ‘leyenda negra’, ‘the black legend’. From the times of Philip II – who sent the Invincible Armada to a stormy grave in 1588 – onwards, they claim, we have had it in for them. Amongst other stories to have been exaggerated beyond belief by anglosajones and protestantes generally, they say, are Philip’s imprisonment of his son Carlos (and his subsequent death, turned into an opera by Verdi and a play by Schiller), the extent of the Inquisition and the treatment of the Jews, Moors or moriscos. Foreign criticism of the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy is still, for some diehard conservatives, just an extension by anti-españoles of the centuries-old plot to do them down.

Until the twentieth century, Spain caught the attention of only the braver or more rugged of Europe’s great writers. Those of a more delicate frame of mind gave it a wide berth. It was too primitive, too mountainous and too dangerous. There were gangs of bandits. There were sudden, violent upheavals. It lacked acceptable restaurants or decent food of any kind. Travellers came back with tales of ragged hordes of filthy, naked children and of people living in caves. Protestants saw sinister flocks of raven-like priests still stained by the sadistic cruelty of the Inquisition. If you wanted museums, Greek or Roman ruins, art, opera, classical music or poetry – better Italy, France or central Europe. The Prado Museum, the baroque finery of Seville and a few remnants of Al Andalus were deemed its few saving graces. ‘To travel in Andalucía you need three francs a day – and a gun,’ said one Frenchman who accompanied the writer Alexandre Dumas on a mid-nineteenthth-century trip.

Spain was not, generally, part of the Grand Tour. It did not have the sophisticated allure of Italy or, even, the ancient charm of Greece. A young Alfred Tennyson was briefly attracted to the cause of Spanish liberalism against the absolutist Fernando VII. His friend William Boyd was executed on the beach at Málaga after trying to start a revolt in 1831. Tennyson later extracted vengeance against the Spaniard in his elegy to Sir Richard Grenville’s foolish and suicidal attempt, two centuries earlier, to fight his way through a fleet of fifty-three Spanish vessels in the appropriately named Revenge. Tennyson’s Spaniards are ‘Inquisition dogs’, ‘the children of the devil’ and ‘a swarthier alien crew’.

Still, historical chauvinism is a two-edged sword. My children will learn at school that Sir Francis Drake was a pirata, rather than the valiant hero I was taught about. They will be getting a more accurate picture of the man who robbed the Spanish blind in the New World and ‘singed the king of Spain’s beard’ by sinking his ships in Cádiz harbour, than I did.

Byron spent a few weeks visiting south-west Spain, skirting around the ongoing Peninsular War, in 1809. He saw a bullfight, refused the amorous advances of his Seville landlady, Josefa Beltram and heard the following ditty ‘La Reyna es una puta/ El Rey es un cabrón/Viva el rey Fernando/ Y muera Napoleon’ ‘The Queen’s a whore, the king is a cuckold, Long live King Fernando, And death to Napoleon’. It was enough, however, to help inspire him to write his Don Juan. Perhaps it was Josefa’s very matter-of-fact forwardness that helped make Byron’s version of the great Latin lover, unlike most of the numerous other Don Juans or Don Giovannis conjured up by European literature and opera, someone pursued by – rather than a cruel pursuer of – women.

Those writers who made it here in the nineteenth century were often wild adventurers. Their lurid tales of bandits, public executions, castanet-clicking dancing girls and bullfights often sold well. France gained a sudden interest in popular Spanish culture thanks, in part, to the wilful, capricious and man-devouring Carmen of Prosper Mérimée and, in turn, Bizet’s opera.

Right up until the middle of the twentieth century, Spain was deemed the preserve of the courageous. ‘Neither in France nor in Italy can one be so frankly frightened,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett in 1954, after thirty years travelling to Spain, including a two-year spell as correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in the 1920s. Visitors often felt, in fact, that it was not Europe at all. It was, if not Africa, at least part of the east. The border itself was a place where Pritchett could ‘feel the break’.

‘Spain is the old and necessary enemy of the West. There we learn our history upside down and see life exposed to the skin,’ said Pritchett who, for precisely that reason, could not get enough of it. On his way back there in the 1950s, he found himself ‘impatient for the drama of the frontier and for the violent contrasts, the discontent and indifference of Spain’. The continent’s Wild West awaited.

For European writers, Spain was often like this. It was so opposite as to provide proof of the values – or, alternatively, the deficiencies – of their own cultures. For the Romans, the men of what they called Hispania were people who enjoyed war, cleaned their teeth in stale urine, ate bear steaks, drank bull’s blood and read the future in the entrails of their executed enemies. For the handful of Romantics prepared to rough it through Spain, they were noble savages, blessedly untouched by the polluting atmosphere of industrial civilisation. For the Wellington-loving Richard Ford – writing in the early nineteenth century – they were at once charming, but also proof of the natural superiority of the British race. George Borrow, meanwhile, wallowed, more entertainingly and possibly more fictionally, in Spain’s nineteenth-century low-life. Frenchman Théophile Gautier came, amongst other things, to ogle at the cigarette-rolling girls of Seville’s tobacco factories in 1840. He was as enraptured by what he considered their animal sexuality, as he was by the ‘violent emotions’ and colour of the bullfight. He wrote:

Mérimée’s Carmen, who was one of the cigarette girls, became the prototype of the wild and sensuous Andalusian woman. ‘She wore a red skirt, very short, which displayed her white silk stockings, with more than one hole in them, and tiny shoes of red morocco, tied with flame-coloured ribbon … She had a cassia flower in the corner of her mouth … and walked along swaying her hips like a filly from the Córdoba stud farm. In my country, a woman in such a costume would have made everyone cross himself. At Seville, everyone paid her some gallant compliment,’ one of her victims, the Basque Navarrese Don José, recounts in Mérimée’s novel. ‘Finally, taking the cassia flower, she threw it with a twist of her thumb and struck me right between the eyes. It seemed to me, señor, that a bullet had hit me.’

Bullfighting was, for some visitors, the ultimate expression of the Spanish attitude to life and death. No one was as obsessed by the bullfight as Ernest Hemingway. He found Spaniards both noble and violent in the manly kind of fashion that he admired. The honour, pride and cruelty of the confrontation between the legendary 1950s bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez epitomised a rugged masculinity that he sought wherever he went. The wine-fuelled bonhomie and man-against-beast adrenalin rush of the running of the bulls during Pamplona’s San Fermín fiestas fitted happily into this virile world. Men could prove themselves in front of half a dozen charging, horned, half-ton animals. With so much overexcited testosterone about, women, or at least visiting ones, did not really fit in, Hemingway thought. ‘Pamplona is no place to bring your wife,’ he says in The Dangerous Summer. ‘It’s a man’s fiesta and women at it make trouble.’

When the Civil War broke out it got even better. Hemingway liked war. Spain, he declared, was ‘good country’. It had given him a large dose of his subject matter. His image of Spain still enraptures American college students, who often arrive with copies of Death in the Afternoon or The Sun Also Rises in their backpacks. Perhaps that is why they always seem to be the first ones gored in Pamplona’s streets every July. Death, or the proximity of it, is the key ingredient of that fiesta. At the time of writing, the last fatal victim was drawn from those US collegiate ranks.

Even in the early 1960s, Jan Morris found Spain still not just markedly, but deliberately, set apart from Europe. This was a country proudly and obstinately turned in on herself. ‘Spain is almost an island,’ she wrote. ‘Whichever way you enter her … instantly you feel a sense of separateness – a geographical fact exaggerated by historical circumstance.’ Morris’s entrance to Spain, via the Roncesvalles pass in the Pyrenees to the River Ebro, shows just how the country seemed petrified in time – and just how much travellers loved it that way. ‘In the middle distance a group of gypsies hastens with caravans, donkeys, and skinny dogs along the road, and beyond them all of Spain seems to be expecting you – Spain of the shrines, Spain of the knights-errant, Spain of the guitars, the bull-rings, and the troglodytes.’

Spain, it often seemed, remained frozen in one of Goya’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century etchings or the earlier portraits of Velázquez. It was a place of haughty, aristocratic Grandees, of poor but noble peasants and of picturesque fiestas. It was also, however, a playground for the Grim Reaper. The dark, primitive forces of war, hunger and violent death constantly threatened to overwhelm it.

‘What about the bloodlust that, as the Civil War and the Carlist War and the Napoleonic War all show, comes over them on particular occasions – that morose, half-sexual, half-religious passion in which they associate themselves with Death and do his work for him?’ Gerald Brenan asks in The Face of Spain, after his post-Civil War return to the country.

‘The daylight Spaniard is the man one sees – sociable, positive, capable of great bursts of energy and animation … and not very imaginative. In his ordinary conduct he is rather a simple person, as one can tell from a glance at Spanish literature,’ Brenan says. But there was another side to Spaniards, which he called ‘the night side’. ‘It is associated with thoughts of death and contempt for life … Menosprecio de la vida, disdain for life! That phrase is like a bell that tolls its way through Spanish history. The Spaniards are great destroyers.’

This was something Protestants felt especially keenly. ‘For nearly two centuries she was the she-butcher, la Verduga, of malignant Rome; the chosen instrument for carrying into effect the atrocious projects of power,’ said the Protestant bible-seller George Borrow. But Spain’s problem was not uncontrolled violence. It was something far more sinful: ‘Fanaticism was not the spring which impelled her to her work of butchery; another feeling, in her the predominant one, was worked upon – her fatal pride.’

The upside of Spanish pride, however, was the nobility that makes savages so admirable. ‘The suspicion common in industrial society, the rudeness of prosperous people, have not touched the Spaniards; one is treated like an equal amongst equals. There is never any avarice. One sits before the hearth, the brushwood blazes up, the iron pan splutters on the fire, and conversation goes on as it has always gone on,’ says Pritchett.

It made Brenan, returning to London, feel floods of nostalgia. ‘As we pass through the packed and sordid streets, I see all about us a throng of plain, rounded faces that lack the distinction of real ugliness. Faces like puddings that seem never to have desired or suffered, smooth vegetable faces, placid cow-like faces, lightly creased and rippled by small worries,’ he complained.

Add in the sensuality of the women, the joyfulness of fiesta, the deadliness of the bullfight and a widely assumed but largely undefined dose of Latin ‘passion’ and the picture of the Spaniards as close to nature was complete. That, often, is how we want them still. A major BBC series on Spain – broadcast in the early 1990s – was called Fire in the Blood. The wacky excess of Almodóvar’s early work fits in too.

Some Spaniards, however, do not take much persuading that the foreign view is more accurate than their own. That is why, for example, Brenan is far better known in Spain than in Britain.

There is more than a touch of masochism in this, because Spaniards are often their own most bitter critics. Fraga’s 1960s advertising slogan still jangles at the back of their minds. ‘España es diferente’, ‘Spain is different’ it tells them – but not proudly so.

‘They tell me the English are a people who travel all over the world to laugh at other countries,’ one Andalusian told Brenan. ‘That’s fine. I thoroughly approve of it. I hope you are having a good laugh at us … I find things to laugh at all day long.’

Brenan’s Andalusian was not the only one who thought like that. Spaniards have a long history of being gloomy about themselves. Often they have ended up crying, rather than laughing. With their last colonies lost in 1898 and an average of a coup, a revolution or a counter-revolution every three years – they spent much of the nineteenth century and most of the first half of the twentieth century in a state of maudlin self-contemplation. Franco’s appearance only encouraged more of it. This was despite of or, perhaps, because of, his promise that he would guide them to ‘la plenitud histórica y espiritual de España’, ‘Spain’s historical and spiritual fulfilment’. The problem, many agreed, was Spaniards themselves.

Mariano José de Larra’s epitaph for his country was: ‘Here lies half of Spain. The other half killed it.’ The poet Antonio Machado added his cheerless welcome to newly born Spaniards with his: ‘May God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart.’

This national self-flagellation carried on well into the twentieth century, with Ortega y Gasset leading the way. ‘Spain is falling to pieces, falling to pieces,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘Today, more than a People, it is the dust that remains.’ Salvador de Madariaga went on to provide the most damning of all verdicts, diagnosing the national illness as yoismo, me-first-ness. ‘Obedience and discipline are hateful things to a Spaniard … Spain is a mound of blocks of uncut granite that support one another with the minimum number of points of contact and the largest amount of mutual bothering per square centimetre as possible.’

Spain is no longer so hard on itself. But it is, once more, in the grip of a round of self-doubt and self-questioning. What is Spain? What is her history? Is it one nation, or several? What sort of a country is it? Is it pulling together, or falling apart? Torrents of ink are now being used up in an attempt to defeat the arguments of nationalists and separatists in the Basque Country or Catalonia. Foreigners may be quoted as support for one or other argument – the idea being that they may, somehow, be above the fray.

All this interest in what foreigners make of Spain means it is a remarkably gratifying place for a newspaper correspondent to work. Radio and television shows seek your opinion. Spanish newspapers reprint your articles. By belonging to the world of the written word, one is often considered to be part of the cultural elite. There is even social cachet. It makes a pleasant change from being punched on the nose on a London doorstep or finding that your profession rates you amongst the least trustworthy people in Britain.

One of the first surprises about reading Spanish history is that many of the great men and women of the discipline are not Spanish at all. Firmly installed amongst them are the hispanistas – foreign experts on Spain. Their names, like that of Brenan, are often better known here than in their own countries.

The hispanistas have been helped by the fact that, for many years, they could write in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that their Spanish colleagues did not share.

One reason why anglosajón historians of Spain have done so well, however, is because of the way they write. A certain Spanish idea of culture as medicine – good for you, even when hard to swallow – is to blame. The hispanista’s flowing, story-telling style contrasts with the often dense and learned, but ultimately turgid, prose of their Spanish rivals. A Spanish editor once explained to me that historians and biographers were either excessively dry and serious or excessively short on real investigation. This helps explain the success of historians like Paul Preston – (biographer of Franco and Juan Carlos) – Hugh Thomas (The Spanish Civil War), Stanley Payne, J. H. Elliott, Raymond Carr, Henry Kamen and the great expert on García Lorca and Dalí, Ian Gibson. These are names that trip easily off the tongues of cultured Spaniards (though not that easily, for only the British are worse linguists than the Spanish). Another reason for their success, however, remains the fact that Spaniards are not always sure whether to trust what their own writers have to say about them.

Spaniards reach for the Bible (Matthew) to explain this suspicion, often driven by envy, of their own great or successful children. ‘Nadie es profeta en su tierra’, ‘No one is a prophet in their own land’, they say. It is certainly true of Pedro Almodóvar. Talk to Her was Hollywood’s choice for the best original screenplay of any film in English or any language. Spain’s own film academy did not even choose it that year as the Spanish candidate for best foreign film at the Oscars.

A recent Spanish study that infuriated Almodóvar pointed out that his characters spent 14 per cent of their time getting off their heads on drugs or alcohol. A total of 170 characters, mainly women, were said to be hashish, heroin or cocaine users. The director said the study, by Spanish university psychologists, left him with ‘a Kafkaesque sensation of fear, disgust, astonishment, fury and indignation’. An artist’s job was not to judge his characters, he said. It was to explain them. ‘Imagine that we analysed Scorsese’s films and found 60 per cent of his characters were gangsters or delinquents who owned weapons and used them a lot. We would have to conclude that Scorsese was a member of an organised crime group.’ Moralistas, he warned, were on their way back.

Moral strictness has always been a generator of the avantgarde. In this Almodóvar, with his childhood in Franco’s rural Spain, is no exception. Both the voyeuristic painter Dalí and the provocative film-maker Buñuel emerged from similar – if more bourgeois – stiff moral backgrounds. Bad Education, the Almodóvar film that came after Talk to Her, featured a paedophile priest and his victims. Almodóvar has said that Bad Education has only a few autobiographical touches. Abuse scenes in the sacristy and river, he said, were based on stories told to him by friends at the school where he boarded. In a 1982 interview, however, he admitted he himself had suffered ‘terrible things’ at the hands of priests. ‘It was a shame, because sex should be discovered naturally, and not brutally, suddenly. For two or three years, I could not be alone, out of pure fear.’ If the priests at his school were only slightly as bullying and abusive as their fictional counterparts, they could be credited with helping imbue in him an abiding interest in what, for the Roman Catholic Church, is the perverse and sinful. To that extent he is a son of the pueblo and, especially, of the pueblos of Francoism. ‘I think my life and all I have done goes against all that, but that is where I am from,’ he says.

Almodóvar is also thoroughly Spanish, taking a special pleasure in using folkloric, religious and popular culture symbols – be they bullfighters, bolero singers or nuns – and subverting them to his own ends. In the 1980s and early 1990s his films were designed to provoke, shock and enthral. It was as if the new space of liberty had, somehow, to be filled up to the edges as quickly as possible – in case it disappeared. That may explain why, when asked by an interviewer for an unrealised erotic fantasy, he replied : ‘My erotic fantasy is to go on a bus, pass by a school, and to see, for example, a father of about thirty-eight picking up his thirteen-year-old daughter. What I would really like to do is go to bed with the father and the daughter at the same time, because I like pubescents a lot, and their fathers, even those with respectable jobs that give them a bit of a paunch.’

To the deluge of kitsch colour was added a torrent of sexual experimentation. Pepi, Luci and Bom, Almodóvar’s first feature-film, introduced Spaniards to the golden shower and featured a penis-measuring contest. His characters have included a truck driver turned transsexual prostitute, a drag-queen judge, several porn stars, an incestuous transsexual and a retired torero who is into post-coital murder. Mostly, however, these characters manage to have a heart of gold. So it is that in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Antonio Banderas takes Victoria Abril captive and ties her up, declaring: ‘I’m twenty-three years old and have 50,000 pesetas. I am alone in the world. I would like to be a good husband to you and a good father to your children.’ Almodóvar’s first heroes were weird but somehow good – at a time when weird finally could be good. They were also, however, transparently unreal. How many heroin-taking convent abbesses are there out there, after all?

Almodóvar was the muse and just about the only durable cultural product of Madrid’s movida. Apart from him, and a few passable musicians, all it produced were a couple of photographers. The best of these is Alberto García-Alix. To view his movida work now, however, is to mourn the dead. Looking at his photos in his flat near Madrid’s Plaza de Santa Ana, I was struck not so much by the undoubted quality of his black-and-white images, but by a photo of a handsome young man in a black bomber jacket, with a touch of the rockabilly to his hair. Young, healthy and happy – this was García-Alix’s brother. He died, like many of the movida’s casualties, from an overdose. ‘Heroin was just part of the scene,’ someone who lived it explained.

The colour and wackiness of Almodóvar’s films have reduced in intensity since the movida died. Almodóvar, like Spain, has matured and moved on. His films are deeper, more intense, more emotional and less noisy. His central characters, however, are still misfits, some to the point of criminal insanity. Almodóvar sets about trying to make us understand or, even, empathise with them. It is as if, having emerged from decades of intolerance, it is now important, if not to tolerate then, at least, to understand everyone. This is, at once, one of modern Spain’s most enduring and potentially dangerous beliefs.

Almodóvar himself is aware of this. ‘I love characters who are crazy in love and will give their life to passion, even if they burn in hell … But this is art. When my friends start behaving that way, I tell them to stop. They say “But look at your movies.” I say: “That is art. Art has its own world.”’

In Bad Education, his dark depiction of child abuse by 1960s priests, Almodóvar even makes a last-minute attempt to help us understand the chief pederast. ‘I have a tendency to redeem my characters,’ he admits. ‘It is very Catholic.’ The pueblo – a phenomenon that crops up increasingly in his films – reappears in the closing scenes of Bad Education in the voice of a brother who has murdered his transsexual sibling. ‘You don’t know what it is like to have a brother like Ignacio and live in a pueblo. You can’t even imagine it!’ he says.

Who else but Almodóvar could have persuaded Hollywood to give him an original screenplay Oscar for a film in which the hero rapes a comatose woman who is the object of his obsessive, self-invented love? That is what happens, off-screen, in Talk to Her. Almodóvar’s invitation, again, is a very modern Spanish one – to understand, or empathise, rather than moralise. He must have felt a special satisfaction at getting that one past those ‘moralistic’ anglosajones – and, especially, censorious Hollywood – of whom many Spaniards so disapprove. Could a film-maker from a different country have made the same sort of films? Almost certainly not. Would Almodóvar still be testing the limits were it not for the era – and the pueblo – he grew up in? I doubt it.

There are signs, however, that Spain may be coming to terms with the pueblo. The Sunday evening traffic jams into Madrid or Barcelona are full of people coming back from weekend escapes to pueblos. Many have second homes in the places where their parents or grandparents were born. In August some villages find their populations multiply several times over as families come back to enjoy a holiday away from the noise and bustle of city life. The summer fiestas have generally survived – being the last thing any self-respecting pueblo will let go of. It is the slow pace and enforced intimacy of the pueblo, however, that begin to seem attractive again. The attraction grows further as Spaniards become increasingly hard-working and stressed.

The film cameras are back in the pueblos too. Almodóvar was one of the first. In The Flower of My Secret his heroine, after being abandoned by her husband, found a zeal for life again after returning to the pueblo. He chose Almagro, just twenty miles away across the scorched and red plain of La Mancha from Calzada de Calatrava. He was there again in 2005 working on a feature film, to be called Coming Back. Death and ghosts returning from the past were scripted to play a major part. ‘The death culture is very strong,’ Almodóvar has explained of his native La Mancha. ‘My mother once told me that my grandfather reappeared after dying, and the whole village collaborated in sending him back to the sweet hereafter. I don’t believe in that, but that’s part of the culture where I was born, and it is part of me.’

Almodóvar was echoing something that García Lorca once said to explain why death was an essential part of duende, the fairy-like Spanish creative spirit. ‘In all countries death is an ending. It arrives and the curtain falls. Not in Spain. In Spain the curtain is raised,’ he said.

The pueblo is also the star of a documentary film – The Sky Turns, by director Mercedes Álvarez. It follows a year in the life of her family’s former pueblo – Aldealseñor, in Soria. Álvarez was the last person born there, more than thirty years ago. The film, shown at Spanish cinemas in 2005, watches the old grow older as the last few inhabitants head towards the grave. Álvarez compares the village’s plight with that of a painter friend who is going blind.

Aldealseñor’s villagers are, naturally, heavily concerned with death. ‘Right up to the end you think you are going to live forever,’ says one. They also remember the Civil War, and tales of those executed by Franco’s people. An elderly shepherd sits against a stone wall and recalls one man’s final words in front of the firing squad. “¡Viva la República!” (“Long live the Republic!”), he shouted,’ says the shepherd shaking his head and cursing to himself.

First-hand memories of those terrible, bloody years will soon be buried, along with the last remaining villagers, in the local cemetery. The passing away of the Civil War generation is part of the wider explanation of why Spain is now looking back to the past. A dark page of history is being definitively turned, and Spaniards finally feel liberated from it. That is both good and bad. They no longer feel constrained by the Pact of Forgetting. Digging up Civil War graves may not be easy, but at least it can now be done. The time lapse since Franco’s death in 1975 is not so great if you compare it with other European countries. It was the generation of 1968 in Germany, two decades after Hitler’s death, that asked how their parents had been involved with the Nazi dictatorship. The French took even longer to seriously assess Vichy and collaboration with Hitler.

If the Transición was a success, it was because Spaniards made a supreme effort to find consensus. That effort was driven, to a large degree, by the Civil War ghosts still haunting so many Spanish households. The divisions now visible in Spain have much to do with the release of those historic constraints. How Spaniards deal with them will be the ultimate test of that Transición.

Spaniards seem to be taking a breather – and taking stock. They have stepped back to contemplate, and to come to terms with, the achievements of the past three decades. These are both many and considerable. They include, largely, the communal Spanish aim of becoming more like other Europeans.

Spain still has its own particular set of historical ghosts. They, above all, are what makes this country, as the hated 1960s advertising slogan put it, ‘different’. What many Spaniards have not yet learned to do, however, is love the idea of their own difference. And that is strange. Because it is precisely why so many outsiders, including this anglosajón, love them so.