In the late summer of 2011 I walked down the familiar, narrow streets of Poyales del Hoyo once more to the Plaza del Moral. The village had changed remarkably little over the previous decade. A few hillside houses with huge plate-glass windows had been built for visitors from Madrid eager to drink in the spectacular, endless views across the plain towards the Montes de Toledo. Apart from that, it was pretty much the same village that I had first encountered on All Saint’s Day, 2002, when I came to see three victims of Civil War death squads reburied. A dizzying decade of building and development across the rest of Spain seemed to have passed it by. Poyales felt strangely suspended in time – for in the intervening years Spain itself had grown at frantic speed until, unable to brake, it had driven off the edge of the cliff. An economic crisis meant almost one in four people were unemployed and, to make things worse, the euro currency was suffering a crisis of potentially epic proportions.

Something was amiss, however, in the Poyales cemetery. The grave where Pilar Espinosa, Virtudes de la Puente and Valeriana Granada had been reburied nine years earlier was now just a rectangular strip of freshly moved earth surrounded by a few inches of chipped cement and broken bricks. A few weeks earlier the new mayor, Antonio Cerro of the Conservative People’s Party (PP), had come here with Virtudes’ granddaughter – who wanted to move the body to a family niche. Pilar and Valeriana’s families were told that only the box containing Virtudes’ bones was being moved. But Mayor Cerro decided that was not enough. He wanted the grave destroyed. The mayor, a retired military man, ordered that the remains of Pilar and Valeriana be thrown into the cemetery’s own anonymous mass grave – where the bones of paupers and those whose families have stopped paying for their niches go. The tombstone with its engraved dove of peace was smashed and taken away. ‘He said it was because the grave was damp,’ said Yash Paul Gosain, Pilar’s great-grandson. ‘But I think it was because his mother’s grave is right beside it.’

The decision to empty the grave – which had received a further seven bodies of Francoist victims dug up from a second mass grave in Poyales earlier in 2011 – provoked furious reactions. The memoria histórica, or ‘historical memory’, movement sparked by those digging up the mass graves left untouched since the Civil War of the 1930s had grown considerably over previous years. Rumours that protesters from around Spain were about to descend on Poyales to spoil the annual summer fiestas provoked an outbreak of communal paranoia. Some villagers had even driven back from their holidays in Alicante, 380 miles away, to ‘protect’ the village against the invaders. In the end only a few dozen protesters turned up led, inevitably, by Mariano López – the man who, in 2002, had overseen the digging up of the anonymous roadside grave where the women had lain. They brought with them a provocative banner that read: ‘We are the grandchildren of the workers you could not kill’. There were angry exchanges when worshippers came out of Sunday mass. ‘If Franco rose from the dead he’d cut your head off, you bastard,’ was one phrase heard in the plaza.

Police had to protect Yash as, megaphone in hand, he tried to explain what they were complaining about. By the time I arrived a few weeks later, only the village fool was talking to him. ‘I thought that some old timer would go for his shotgun and we would be back to 1936 again,’ he said. Police had kept a special watch for several days, while things calmed down. Writs and counter-writs had been lodged at the local court house – accusing the mayor of acting outside the law, his councillors of inciting violence and the historical memory campaigners of illegally demonstrating. Peace, decidedly, had not broken out. The atmosphere, indeed, was tenser than it had been nine years earlier when the corpses were first buried. It was as if a contained fury against the dead had finally broken through.

I spoke separately to Mayor Cerro, to Mariano and to Yash. Cerro continued to claim he had moved the bones on ‘humanitarian’ grounds after finding the grave waterlogged. All insisted on the iniquity, deceitfulness and outright nastiness of the other side. ‘When everyone has gone you’ll be here alone, and then we’ll kill you,’ one villager had told Yash – who spoke perfect castellano, though he had been born to one of Pilar’s granddaughters after she had emigrated to England and married. A mild-mannered town councillor representing the United Left party was rumoured to be selling his house, tired of the intolerance.

Afterwards I drove back up the curving road to Candeleda and stopped at the site of the original mass grave where the bodies of the three women had been dumped after being shot on a rainy December night in 1936. A stone monument erected on the spot was covered in graffiti that had been sprayed the night after the PP won town-hall elections in both Candeleda and Poyales that May. ‘Arriba España!’ said one, echoing the cry of Franco’s military regime. The yoke-and-arrows symbol of the Falange, whose members had perpetrated the crime, had been spray-painted in black on the monument.

It was a depressing find. I want to believe, but am not entirely sure, that it was an exception. In the years since their grave was dug up the three women’s names had become reasonably well known. A play had been written about them. A film, La Luna Ciega, had been made from the play. Their story had crossed borders, too. Just a few weeks before I returned, two Englishmen had driven into Poyales del Hoyo with an earlier edition of this book in their hands, looking for their grave. But I should have known that many on the other side of Spain’s divide felt the historical memory movement was getting too big for its boots. I should probably have realised, too, that if anyone was going to rile them it was Mariano with his relentless, unshaded view of a past divided between absolute good and equally absolute evil.

Back in Madrid I bumped into Emilio Silva, whose exhumation of his grandfather’s grave in Priaranza del Bierzo had opened my eyes to Spain’s secret past and had also inspired imitators in Poyales del Hoyo and elsewhere. He now headed a nationwide organisation that had recovered some 5,500 bodies of Francoist victims from 280 mass graves – and which had finally pushed a reluctant Socialist government into regulating and, in some cases, subsidising the exhumations. Emilio was in despair. This was partly because he thought that Mariano and his friends in Poyales del Hoyo had been too provocative, but also because these were the dying days of eight years of Socialist government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Mariano Rajoy, the PP leader who became prime minister a few weeks afterwards in December 2011, had already expressed scorn at the historical memory movement founded by Silva and others.

Were the events in Poyales in the summer of 2011 a taste of what was to come under Rajoy? I was not sure. Rajoy – who was handed an economy in its worst state for decades – had other worries. And he himself had moderated his tone in recent years. Historical memory was a painful issue – but the proliferation of exhumations, books, documentary films and monuments had done much to redress the balance of wilful ignorance left over by the years of silence and forgetting. Some of Rajoy’s most right-wing supporters – those, like Mayor Cerro, whose world-view is shored up by a raft of vociferous new ultraconservative media outlets – would dearly like the historical memory movement to be cut dead. Rajoy himself, whose grandfather was banned from teaching at university by Franco because he had helped draft a statute of autonomy for Galicia in 1932, seems too intelligent to seek confrontation on an issue that often makes his party look both unfeeling and vengeful. But if Emilio had his doubts, he also had his reasons. For Rajoy had been one of the main protagonists of a long period of intense political acrimony, of what Spaniards called crispación, that followed the dramatic 2004 election of Zapatero. The dead and disappeared of the Civil War were just part of a cocktail of issues that, over a four-year period, provoked a degree of confrontation between Spaniards unseen since the 1930s.

If I had to pick a single day on which all this crystallised, it would be the last day of October 2007. It was, by chance, a day when several of the historical currents described in this book suddenly flowed together. It also marked a fresh peak of crispación, encapsulating the atmosphere of a country struggling to confront the past, both recent and distant.

It was an unusually bright and sunny morning, something that the ranks of television journalists lined up outside a newly built court house in Madrid’s Casa de Campo park were specially glad of. Behind a bullet-proof glass enclosure inside the court sat more than a dozen men, all accused of involvement with the gang that carried out the bomb attacks on commuter trains that had shattered the Spanish capital – and Spaniards’ hearts – in March 2004. The tensest spot in the building, however, was a basement room where relatives of the 191 dead and some of the 1,856 injured in the worst-ever terrorist attack on European soil had gathered to hear the verdicts. After three years of bitter, divisive debate, Spain was about to find out what had really happened on that fateful day.

At 11.30 that morning Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez, the head of a panel of three judges that had spent eight months listening to testimony and then studying documents, began to read out their conclusions and hand down sentences. I had sat in that court house on the first day of the trial beside a nervous Clara Escribano, the woman who – earlier in this book – described what it was like to be on one of the trains when the bombs exploded. ‘I want to look them in the face,’ she told me before we stepped into the overheated, soporific courtroom.

Two days earlier I had visited her at home in the barrio of Santa Eugenia. She had pulled out for me the box in which she kept – in the form of press cuttings, photos and documents – the memories of that day. Amongst the photos was one of Clara sitting on the railway station steps after her escape from the wrecked train, blood still streaked across her face and a look of absolute perplexity in her eyes. Leafing through those documents, it soon became clear that – in Clara’s house at least – the psychological scars would take a long time to heal.

As Judge Bermúdez settled down to read out the verdict an angry debate was starting across town in that same lower house of parliament where Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s would-be golpistas had once peppered the ceiling with machine-gun fire. The government, after years of procrastinating, was finally presenting a historical memory law designed to honour General Franco’s victims. The law would help those who – like the relatives of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana in Poyales del Hoyo – wished to exhume the dead still lying in the mass graves he left behind. It was an emotional moment. Many had believed that, despite the fact that Prime Minister Zapatero’s grandfather was amongst those shot by Franco’s firing squads, the government would never stick by its pledge to pass a law. The wounds were obviously still sore. Conservative Spain was in uproar and the government had become increasingly jittery about the subject.

It is hard to convey just how strongly the two, apparently unconnected, themes of the bombings and Franco’s legacy became wedges that widened the already deep rift that had opened up between Spaniards. Along with similarly vicious debates about the rights and wrongs of negotiating with Basque terrorist group ETA or giving Catalonia greater self-government, two tides of Spanish opinion were at loggerheads. I had never seen the country so riven by apparently unbridgeable divides in my twenty years here.

I only realised quite how deep the chasm separating Spaniards had become when I was asked to talk about this book – after it had been published in Spanish – on a radio show hosted by the conservative COPE radio station, which is partially owned by the Roman Catholic Church. I was struck dumb when a regular participant on the show suddenly claimed that, following the bombings, Spain had become a dictatorship once more. This was absurd hyperbole. A quick glimpse out of the studio window would have told him that absolute normality reigned. He was not alone, however, in his angry analysis. A significant, and highly vocal, sector of right-wing Spain saw the bombings as a kind of coup d’état.

A form of inverted logic had been applied, in which whoever gained from a situation was deemed automatically responsible for it. The Socialists had benefited from the bombings at elections three days later, when voters threw out the Conservative People’s Party government. Therefore, the warped logic went, the shadow of suspicion must fall over Zapatero and his new Socialist government. Nobody accused the Socialists outright of planting the bombs themselves, but the idea of some kind of moral implication in the attacks was left to float poisonously in the air.

The train bombings launched a thousand conspiracy theories. The only thing they had in common was that all cast Zapatero’s government – even though it had not been in power at the time – in a bad light. The theories were easy to construct, because vital evidence about who carried out the attacks had disappeared when eight of the bombers committed mass suicide by blowing themselves up. This, inevitably, left what were suspiciously called ‘black holes’ in the investigation. Wherever a question could not be answered, a conspiracy (or a conspiracy of silence) was constructed.

Chief amongst those theories was the idea that ETA was involved in the bombings – and that the police, public prosecutors, courts and Socialist government were somehow intent on covering this up. This, of course, was the idea that the People’s Party government of the time had mistakenly and, perhaps, deliberately clung to.

ETA was explicitly ruled out by Judge Bermúdez and his colleagues. The attack, according to the judges’ narration of the proven facts of the case, was carried out by ‘a jihadist group’. The court tried twenty-eight people, finding twenty-one of them guilty. With most of the bombers already dead, few of those directly involved were available for trial. Only Jamal Zougam, the telephone salesman from Lavapiés, was found guilty of actually planting the bombs. A second Islamist, Othman El Gnaoui, was also declared guilty of ‘terrorist murder’ for aiding the bombers. The third mass murderer was not a Muslim immigrant but a Spanish miner, Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who stole and then sold the explosives that killed so many of his countrymen.

Spain has no death sentence, nor does it hand down life prison terms. The three men will each serve up to thirty years in jail. A dozen other defendants were given lesser prison terms for belonging to a terrorist group, but their direct participation in the attacks was not proved.

The joint leaders of the gang were two of the men who had blown themselves up – the violent drug smuggler Jamal Ahmidan, alias El Chino, and the quiet, postgraduate economist Serhane Ben Abdelmajid, alias El Tunecino. Documentary film-maker Justin Webster spent time after the attacks getting close to the friends and families of both men. His film, The Madrid Connection, revealed some deep psychological truths about them. Both men sought, and failed to find, an identity as Muslim immigrants into Spain. El Chino had fled his native Morocco after killing a man in a knife-fight. He ended up selling doses of heroin, living on the edge and wielding a knife in Madrid’s Lavapiés district. ‘We consumed cocaine non-stop,’ the mother of his child said, recalling the days when he was a feared, street-wise petty crook. He later cured his own heroin habit, made large sums of money with the illegal night-club drug ecstasy and turned to religion. ‘I don’t care if I die,’ he told his girlfriend during his down days. ‘I’ll never see my family again.’ The intense, polite El Tunecino failed to understand why he had such a lowly status in Spanish society. ‘Why are they better than us? I am also a man. I am intelligent, a student, an economics graduate. Why aren’t I equal to them?’ he would ask his Muslim friends. El Chino turned to crime. El Tunecino turned to religious extremism. Eventually, and lethally, they turned to one another.

‘Caso cerrado’, ‘Case closed’, cried La Vanguardia newspaper the morning after Judge Bermúdez had read out the verdict. Unfortunately that was not the case. Before the trial the People’s Party had given wings to the conspiracy theories. Afterwards, it called for further investigation. The Socialists reacted in kind. ‘Say after me – “It was not ETA”,’ taunted interior minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba – who would eventually go on to replace Zapatero as the party’s leader in the 2011 elections. An opinion poll for the Cadena SER radio station, a week after the sentence, found one in six Spaniards still thought ETA had been involved. Some 57 per cent thought the People’s Party government of the time had tried to fool them about who had carried out the attacks. The division, as ever, was deep. This particular ghost may never be laid to rest.

The ferocious debate over the historical memory law proved that this, too, was a matter on which Spaniards were never going to agree. ‘Zapatero wants to divide Spaniards and turn them against each other,’ the People’s Party’s Ángel Acebes said when the new law was presented. Francoism had not been that bad, argued another former People’s Party minister, Jaime Mayor Oreja. ‘It was an extraordinarily placid time,’ he said.

Zapatero’s government took several years to come up with a law, knowing that it was walking through a historical minefield. The pact of forgetting, however, remains intact as far as the naming of perpetrators is concerned. An early draft of the law proposed what amounted to ‘victims’ certificates’ – which a family could request and which would detail exactly what happened to their deceased or disappeared relative. But those documents would have explicitly omitted ‘any reference to the identity of anyone who took part in the events’. There would, in other words, be no individual guilt.

The earlier drafts of the law – however carefully it trod – had enraged conservative opinion, increasingly represented by the country’s Roman Catholic bishops and El Mundo newspaper. The former argued that a historical memory law would reopen old wounds. The latter claimed it broke the spirit of Spain’s transition to democracy. Both claimed the law was one-sided. The Vatican intervened in the debate in its fashion, holding its largest-ever mass beatification in October 2007. On that occasion 498 people, almost all of them Spanish priests and nuns killed by leftist Republicans during the civil war, were beatified.

Amongst those attending the Vatican ceremony was José Andrés Torres Mora, a Socialist deputy from Malaga whose great-uncle, Juan Duarte, was one of the martyrs. Duarte was a priest whose killers – Republican militiamen – reportedly first cut his genitals off with a barber’s knife. ‘I don’t share his beliefs, but I especially don’t share those of the people who shot him,’ said Torres Mora. By co-incidence, Torres Mora was hand-picked by Zapatero to propose the historical memory law to parliament – a task that, he told me, he accepted as a painful, if necessary, burden. ‘Let us respect the idea that those who suffered during the Civil War should be recognised, just as I accept the beatification of five hundred martyrs,’ he said.

The law was, in fact, largely symbolic. Francoist symbols, it ruled, must be removed from public, or publicly funded, buildings. (A last minute let-out clause absolved the Church from this.) The kind of political events I had witnessed in the Valley of the Fallen on the anniversary of Franco’s death were banned. The underground basilica where Franco is buried can now be used only for religious motives. A committee of experts was set up and recommended that his remains be removed, but that is unlikely to happen as it would need the consent of the Church. Some 450,000 descendants of those who left Spain between 1936 and 1955, for political or economic reasons, were allowed to apply for nationality. Most came from Cuba or Argentina. The grave-diggers – those exhuming the victims of Francoist death squads – benefited directly. Over the next four years they received 8 million euros to dig up graves. A further 17 million euros were handed out, amongst other things, for work in archives, on oral history projects and to start creating a countrywide map marking the grave sites. Some previously inaccessible archives were also formally opened up. Amongst those watching the debate in parliament was Emilio Silva, who had started the exhumations by digging up his grandfather’s grave in Priaranza. ‘This law is the beginning, not the end, and it is long overdue,’ he said. Only the People’s Party and the separatist Catalan Republican Left party voted against it, the latter because it did not go far enough. In fact, like several of the major compromises reached by the Zapatero government, it ended up angering both sides – who deemed it either outrageous or insufficient.

With so much angry political mud-slinging, the historical memory debate lacked the subtlety and depth reached in other countries with similarly ghastly pasts. What about individual or collective guilt, for example? Sectarian Spain has no one like the Czech Republic’s Václav Havel prepared to say that the line separating regime collaborators from opponents runs not between individual people, but through them. The Havel theory suggests that all Spaniards were in some way involved in propping up the regime, even those who disliked it. Were police officers automatically collaborators? And judges? Or schoolteachers? And what about journalists or writers who accepted censorship? These questions have not been answered. They have not even been asked.

The strength of the taboo about apportioning individual blame for Francoism became clear in 2008 when the intrepid and controversial investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón became involved. In October that year he agreed to investigate a complaint brought to his court by several historical memory groups who wanted the courts to help unveil the truth about the past. Garzón wrote a memorable auto – the formal document that gave his reasons for taking on the case – arguing that international law obliged him to investigate claims of forced disappearance and crimes against humanity. Such crimes, he stated, were not covered by amnesties. He even named thirty-five senior Francoist officials responsible for the alleged crimes. They included Franco himself and his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer – who had died just five years earlier. Rather conveniently, all those on the list were dead.

Garzón’s auto reads like a manifesto for the historical memory movement. It lays out, line by line, the grievances of those whose relatives were left to rot in anonymous, mass graves after the 18 July 1936 uprising by Franco and his allies against the elected Republican government. ‘The armed uprising of this date was planned and organised with the intention of bringing an end to Spain’s form of government [and] attacking, detaining or physically eliminating people who held positions of responsibility in the higher organs of the state,’ he wrote. Franco and his allies, he argued, had carried out a plan that involved ‘the detention, torture, forced disappearance, and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives and which caused the displacement and exile of thousands of people, both within and outside the country – a state of affairs that continued, to a greater or lesser extent, after the Civil War ended.’

He proposed creating a team of official court investigators. ‘This investigation aims to discover the truth about what happened, and identify the perpetrators with the aim of establishing individual responsibilities and resolving the question of any criminal responsibility if [the individual] has died,’ Garzón said. He was, in short, proposing a trial of Spain’s ghosts – though only, he hastened to add, as a means of finding more of the dead.

In talking about the disappeared, Garzón was delving into a terrain he knew well from his successful use of international human rights law to prosecute Argentine torturers and to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested. He also wanted to introduce a crucial new concept into Spanish jurisprudence. Garzón was saying that where people had simply been ‘disappeared’ there could be no statute of limitations or amnesty on the crime as it was, effectively, an ongoing kidnapping. ‘The crime, and the effects that derive from that, only ceases with the discovery of the corpses of the disappeared, or when public authorities can offer absolute and accurate information as to their whereabouts,’ Garzón said. ‘Today the whereabouts of many of those detained is still not known, and that is why in this case there is a demand to identify those responsible.’ This was the argument used in Chile to pursue Pinochet’s thugs and sidestep amnesty laws. Crucially, it opened the door to police investigations of the deaths in Spain. And it drove a section of right-wing opinion to apoplectic fury.

Garzón was immediately targeted by a group of far-right lawyers who had set up a pseudo trade union called Manos Limpias to pursue politically motivated cases through the courts. They petitioned Garzón’s fellow judges to declare that he had overstepped his powers with his auto on Francoist crimes. In a separate case, he was accused before the Supreme Court of wrongfully allowing police to eavesdrop defence lawyers in a corruption case involving senior People’s Party officials – the so-called Gürtel case, which eventually led to the downfall of the party’s regional prime minister in Valencia, Francisco Camps. In a third case, it was claimed Garzón had failed to declare an interest in a case involving Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank, which helped finance a conference he was involved in while taking a year’s sabbatical at New York University.

The Falange, which had manned many of Franco’s death squads, made a remarkable – if brief – return to the limelight by formally joining the attempts to prosecute him. Garzón denied all the allegations, but he had made too many enemies (and, quite possibly, too many mistakes) to survive this sustained attack. Many of his fellow judges were envious of his star status, or simply disliked his way of doing things. His penchant for grand gestures had been encouraged and applauded when the targets were popular hate-figures like the drugs clans of Galicia or ETA and its supporters. Few had worried, then, if he was being high-handed. But when he turned his guns on those closer to home, and against both the People’s Party and some deeply entrenched conservative ideas, powerful critics appeared. A growing right-wing bias in the upper echelons of Spain’s highly politicised judiciary also worked against him. The Supreme Court agreed to suspend him in May 2010 while the case against him for his investigation into Francoist crimes (which he had eventually passed down to lower courts in the provinces) was prepared and heard. Garzón was snapped up, in the meantime, by the International Court of Justice at The Hague and, then, by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. The so-called superjuez was a star everywhere else but Spain.

Somehow it was no surprise to me that his nemesis should come, precisely, as he dared tangle with the explosive affair of historical memory. In a dazzling career Garzón had successfully battled corruption, state-sponsored terror, drugs clans, arms traffickers, international human rights abuses and terrorism itself. But Spain’s Francoist past was, in the end, a tougher opponent. It proved just how long a shadow Franco had cast. Garzón’s defeat means that, at least for the moment, the golden rule of the Transición remains in place. No one must be blamed or punished for what happened while the Generalísimo ruled Spain. Indeed, Franco himself is the only one to blame – as if he had organised the whole thing single-handedly. It is a way to keep Francoism conveniently in the abstract.

Bizarrely, or perhaps not, Spain’s refusal to investigate and punish those involved may be circumvented by an appeal lodged in an Argentine court. Victims have taken a case to an investigating magistrate in Buenos Aires that mirrors the one Garzón successfully brought against Argentine torturers, including navy captain Adolfo Scilingo, in Madrid. Their basic plea to the court is that, as Spain is refusing to investigate, international human rights law obliges courts in other countries to do so instead. Garzón’s prosecution of Scilingo helped push the Argentine courts into finally trying – and often jailing – the military junta’s thugs. It will be fascinating to see what the Argentine courts do with the Spanish case.

The third great point of discord during the Zapatero years was ETA, whose ghostly presence already floated around the train bombing debate. The row that had been waiting to erupt finally blew when ETA called a cease-fire in 2006. Should Spain negotiate, or not? Zapatero was ready to discuss the future of ETA’s prisoners, but not to budge on political matters. Even this much negotiating, however, was denounced as treason by those prepared to throw the dead into the debate. ‘You have decided to change course, betray the dead and allow ETA to recover the ground lost before it was cornered,’ said Rajoy. ETA soon brought the debate to a dramatic close. A bomb planted at Madrid’s shiny new airport building in December 2006 killed two Ecuadorian immigrants, shattering hopes of peace. But the attempt of a few hard-liners to launch a new campaign of violence soon faltered. Spanish police picked up their leaders one by one, and social support in the Basque country itself slipped away. The 2006 cease-fire had raised expectations. Even the normally pro-ETA politicians from the banned Batasuna party wanted the violence to end. It was not that they were morally opposed to it, but it was by now clear that it simply did not work.

On a Sunday afternoon in October 2011, I picked up the telephone and dialled a number I had been asked to call outside Spain. The person who answered the phone, and must remain anonymous, was excited. ‘It is time to write ETA’s obituary,’ he proclaimed. Over the next few days, he said, I would see a historic chain of events that would culminate in ETA declaring that it had renounced violence for ever. Europe’s oldest terrorist group was giving up the battle. Police work, Spanish democracy and the willpower of ordinary Basques had killed it off. I wrote a story for my newspaper, travelled north to San Sebastián and waited for it to happen.

Sure enough, four days later another phone call told me that in a few hours I would receive access to a video in which ETA announced the end. Three ETA leaders, wearing white silk masks and big black berets, sat at a table with an array of Basque flags behind them. ‘ETA has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity,’ they declared. At the time of writing we still do not know who they were, but an educated guess would make them David Pla, Iratxe Sorzábal and Izaskun Lesaka – three of the few ETA leaders not to have been detained by late 2011. It was not a full rendition. Nor had ETA disbanded or given up its arms. But, peace negotiators involved in the process assured me, that would inevitably come.

I recalled some of the harsher moments of reporting over the previous two decades on Europe’s last violent separatist movement. A couple of years earlier I had walked through the police lines close to the charred wreckage of the Renault Mégane where police inspector Eduardo Puelles had been killed by a car bomb in a Bilbao suburb. ‘Get me out of here! Get me out!’ he had screamed as the flames spread. I remembered some earlier scenes: a small child in a dressing gown running around the San Sebastián apartment of Gregorio Ordóñez, a local PP city councillor who had been murdered by ETA a few weeks earlier; the bitter hatred felt by a wheelchair-bound Civil Guard officer whose incontinence brought the daily humiliation of wearing, and changing, nappies; or the intense, tearful youths at the funeral of an ETA member in the Basque industrial town of Soraluze. Few pieces of news, I realised, had brought me such joy.

The end is not yet written. ETA has still to formally disband. A former interior minister warned me that ‘there is always the danger of a split, of a breakaway group like the Real IRA in Northern Ireland’. With Rajoy, ETA is unlikely to get anything more than slightly better prison conditions for the six hundred members in Spanish and French jails. The group’s decision to stop killing is, in short, a defeat. But Amaiur – a political party that incorporates separatists of all kinds – won 24 per cent of Basque votes in a general election held four weeks after ETA announced an end to violence. Politics is now a surer choice for separatists than violence.

Whenever the issue of Basque separatism raises its violent head, peaceful Catalonia somehow ends up being pulled into the debate. Discussion of the region’s medium-term future ended, however, when a new statute of autonomy was passed in 2006. The verbose statute (which, with 227 clauses, is longer than Spain’s constitution) gave Catalans still more self-government while nudging Spain further towards de facto federalisation. A new, and deliberately ambiguous, duty for people living in Catalonia to ‘know’ the Catalan language proved one of the most controversial clauses.

The debate, again, was heated. Lieutenant General José Mena, the head of Spain’s 50,000-strong ground forces, was sacked after he claimed the constitution gave the armed forces the right to act if the ‘unity of Spain’ was in danger. After reading an early draft of the statute, he warned that if ‘limits are broken … the armed forces have as their mission to guarantee the sovereignty and independence of Spain … There will be serious consequences for the armed forces as an institution and its members if the Catalan charter is approved in its current terms.’

Inevitably, in a country obsessed by history, the statute turned to the past to justify itself. The preamble contains a dozen dates stretching back to 1359. It also, however, planted the seed of future arguments. ‘The parliament of Catalonia has defined Catalonia as a nation,’ it states, while going on to recognise that the Spanish constitution does not define it that way. The statute became another of those Zapatero compromises that angered almost everyone – especially after the Constitutional Court decided to water down some sections. (The court reined in attempts to make Catalan the senior official language above Castilian Spanish and took away the region’s new powers over local judges. A hair-splitting decision allowed Catalans to claim they belonged to a nation, while stating that the claim had no legal worth.) Catalan nationalists blamed Zapatero for these changes – as if he was somehow meant to control the court – and claimed they had been tricked. Many of the other sixteen autonomous regions into which Spain is divided also got new statutes in these years, each one grandiloquently proclaiming the unique nature of the region it applied to. But the Constitutional Court’s decision on the Catalan statute was a high-water mark in devolution. There is little room to give away more powers without a rewrite of Spain’s constitution (except in taxation – where Catalonia eyes the Basque system with envy). The new PP government is, in any case, against further devolution. Indeed, as Spain struggles to meet strict public deficit targets imposed by the European Union, there is even talk of some regions handing back some powers. That seems unlikely, but it is reasonable to expect a long pause in the process of decentralisation and federalisation of Spain. It is just as reasonable, however, to expect Catalans and Basques to become increasingly separatist. With the doors to further devolution closed, that becomes the only option for those wanting more regional power. Opinion polls in recent years have, in any case, thrown up curious results. A poll in Catalonia in the summer of 2010, just after the Constitutional Court decision on the statute, briefly gave more than 50 per cent backing for separatism. The poll was not an impassioned cry for independence but, as the polling company itself commented, more a case of Catalans giving a laconic ‘Why not?’ reply. Just a few months later only one in ten actually voted for separatist parties in regional elections.

As politics became increasingly vicious in the era of crispación, Spaniards began asking themselves if something deeper was going wrong. In the round of newspaper, television and radio interviews that accompanied the launch of the Spanish edition of this book, I was constantly asked whether the ‘Two Spains’ of the Civil War had reappeared. My answers, I am afraid to say, were equivocal. Some days I said ‘yes’. On others I answered ‘no’. It was not an easy question. On the one hand, the rift between left and right (and, along Spain’s other main fault line, between centralists and regional nationalists) was stronger, nastier and more verbally violent than I had ever seen. So, yes, the Two Spains had reappeared. On the other hand, no one was about to pick up a gun and start murdering their neighbours for political reasons (except, of course, ETA). So, no, this was nothing like the situation before the Civil War. I was angry that I could not find an answer, for the book obviously invited the question.

It was not until the El País newspaper invited me to the Camp Nou football stadium to watch Barcelona FC play and then be interviewed for a slot in the newspaper that combined soccer with politics and literature that I finally reached a conclusion. With the magical play of Leo Messi (then accompanied by Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o) to inspire me, I pondered the ‘Two Spains’ question that I was inevitably going to be asked. The answer finally came to me during the interview which, this being Spain, was conducted over a meal that started at midnight and ended some time after 2 a.m.

The answer, it seemed, was that Spain had entered a new phase in its, admittedly short, democratic history. A combination of José María Aznar’s second term in power, Zapatero’s social changes, the historical memory debate, the train bombings and the bitter debate over negotiating with ETA brought a true end to Spain’s transition to democracy. During that transition Spain reached a historically extraordinary, and invaluable, degree of consensus. This covered everything from foreign policy to terrorism. Most importantly, it lasted long enough for Spaniards to build a new state, with a new democratic constitution and decentralised administration. The Transición, however, was not normal. It was, in fact, an exception in Spanish history.

In Zapatero’s first term the fig leaf of consensus was removed. Both sides played their part in the process. There had, anyway, been something false about that consensus – almost as if Spaniards, horrified by the past, were trying too hard to dissimulate the things that separated them. The gloves had started coming off during Aznar’s second term. His People’s Party, buoyed by an absolute majority in parliament, felt confident enough to tread a genuinely ideologically right-wing path. Spain had not experienced such a thing for decades. The Iraq war, which Aznar backed, definitively broke any consensus on foreign policy. The political left, for its part, broke the consensus that underlay the pact of forgetting by bringing historical memory, Francoism and the Spanish Civil War to the table.

The train bombings shattered any remaining consensus. Even terrorism, whether by Islamists or by ETA, now became open territory for party political warfare. In many countries this would seem normal. Who would expect opposing political parties on the left and right to agree on such things? In Spain, however, it was both new and scary. It was made more frightening by the virulence with which, once released, these differences were expressed by politicians and opinion-makers in the press. That, however, is the nature of suppressed debates. Like suppressed emotions, they burst forth with uncontrolled vigour when they are released.

This state of confrontation reflects the historical – perhaps, even, natural – tensions within Spain. It may well be permanent, though it will not always be as virulent as it was in the early Zapatero years. There is, however, one huge difference between today and any time previous to the Transición. Spanish democracy is solidly established. It provides a stage upon which the old battles can be fought without blood being spilt. So yes, the Two Spains are back. They never really went away. The difference is that, in democracy, their arguments can be safely thrashed out.

Spaniards have now reached a moment of economic crisis, anyway, when they must worry more about the future than the past. That future no longer affects just the 40 million Spaniards who made up the country’s population at the turn of the century. For the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a social revolution that had little to do with politics and everything to do with a booming economy that needed fresh labour. Spain, a country with a vivid and recent memory of emigration, suddenly became a beacon for migrants from elsewhere. In a single decade some 5 million people arrived – possibly the biggest population shift seen in Europe for decades.

Carmen Tejada was one of the first to come, beating the rush by almost a decade. In autumn 1991 she flew to Lisbon after borrowing 2,500 dollars for a plane ticket from a loan shark in her home town of Pacasmayo, Peru. The extortionate interest rate was 20 per cent, or 500 dollars, per month. She had left behind her two children, Karina and Joey, aged eleven and thirteen, and a job earning 200 dollars a month working a sweatshop sewing machine. The following day she wandered down the white mo saic pavements of the Portuguese town of Elvas and tried to work out the best route across the nearby Spanish border. A taxi driver offered to take her all the way to Madrid – the same city where her sister Ana had been turned back at the airport and sent home to Peru a few months earlier – for 1,000 dollars. ‘But I worked out that I could probably make it if I just got on the train. At the worst, they might force me to stay in Portugal. I was very nervous, but when they checked our passports in the middle of the night I said I was a teacher who just wanted to do some sightseeing in Madrid. They let me through,’ she said. Carmen arrived on a Saturday. She found a job as a maid on Tuesday. Within three months she had paid off her loan. ‘I only needed 100 dollars a month to live on. I sent everything else back to Peru. The money even put a roof on the second floor of our house there,’ she said.

Within a year her eight brothers and sisters had all made the same trip. Within three years her husband Fernando (who, scared of border guards, paid the Portuguese taxi drivers’ 1,000 dollar taxi fee) and her two children were with them. A middleman smuggled the children in via Germany and France. In all, some eighty people from her extended family came. ‘It was very easy for women to find work as live-in maids,’ she said. ‘The men had a more difficult time, but eventually construction took off and they too were working.’

Carmen was a pioneer, arriving in Spain just a few weeks after I had also returned for what would become a permanent stay. The country we both found was still racially and – barring regional differences – culturally homogeneous. For Carmen and her extended family it was an El Dorado. None of them would now consider going back – though, when cancer threatened, Carmen flew home to get a second opinion from a Peruvian doctor. Twenty years later she has Spanish nationality and Spanish grandchildren. She owns a small flat and a house with a little orchard in the countryside. Many of her nieces and nephews are studying at university. One has a master’s degree in marketing.

Hers is a tale that could be repeated by millions of immigrants. The drip-drip of new arrivals in the 1990s became a flood in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The number of foreigners living in Spain leapt from 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, or 5.6 million people – and Spain’s population jumped 10 per cent to 45 million as a result. Most came from Latin America, home to an endless pool of potential immigrants who already share cultural, linguistic and religious values with Spaniards. Some came from Morocco and Algeria. More desperate immigrants from Africa also arrived – often on perilous boat journeys to the beaches of the Canary Islands, where hundreds lost their lives at sea.

The building boom encouraged by the growing housing bubble (which, in turn, was a result of cheap credit available in the newly created euro currency zone) meant that those who arrived in the middle of the decade had pretty much the same job-seeking exper ience as Carmen. Many were working within a week of stepping off the plane with a tourist visa in their passport.

‘The reality of the situation overwhelms the provisions of desk-bound sociologists,’ El País commented as the total number hit 3.7 million, or 8.7 per cent of the population, by the end of 2005. A decade of continuous growth meant there were jobs for all. The social security payments of immigrant workers provided an unexpected bonanza for the state, postponing a looming pensions crisis.

A few years ago a friend in Madrid observed that, although he knew there were hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the city, he rarely saw them. ‘Where are they?’ he asked. ‘They are working – and saving,’ was the answer. But that was before the economic bust. In 2012 unemployment amongst immigrants is running at almost one-third. Along with Spanish youth (with 46 per cent of the under-twenty-fives out of work), they are suffering worst. Some are giving up and heading back to booming Latin America. Many leave still owing money to Spanish banks which gave them mortgages and then repossessed their homes at half the price – leaving them with no home but a large debt. Spanish law does not allow you to cancel the debt by handing the keys back. In a rare show of political muscle, Ecuadorean immigrants have turned on the banks and are currently trying to get a law passed through their home parliament in Quito that would prevent them being chased for debts if they go back.

Spaniards claim not be racist. Many genuinely are not. Indeed some immigrants may not have counted on Spaniards being so nosily welcoming. ‘¡Bebé bien!’ ‘Baby fine!’ is the scowling, hurried answer given by the young Chinese mother who runs our corner shop. She is interrogated on a daily basis by dozens of clients who insist on asking about her new-born infant. This is one of five Chinese-run shops to have appeared on just four blocks of our street in half a dozen years – along with three grocery stores owned by Pakistanis or Ecuadorians. The former are immeasurably better than the poorly stocked Spanish mom-and-pop stores that preceeded them. And all open late into the night. Madrid, and especially its restaurants, has become immeasurably better because of them.

Spaniards often explain that the memory of emigration is still vivid here, and this explains why racism has failed to take a hold. José Andrés Torres Mora recalls how his father, a migrant worker, had wept and begged before a German consul after being told he must return to Malaga to get his papers – a place he could not afford to travel back to. ‘It is believed that about a third of Spaniards who emigrated to Germany went without papers,’ he wrote in El País as a debate began to rage about how many immigrants in Spain were there illegally. ‘In the sixties, after a civil war and twenty-five years of dictatorship, some 2 million Spaniards had to emigrate, and many did so illegally.’

Any visit to a first division soccer stadium reveals, however, that casual racism is rife. Black players are routinely greeted by racist chants. I heard ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ being hurled at Real Madrid’s Brazilian defender Marcelo Vieira on a recent visit to Atlético de Madrid’s Vicente Calderón stadium. My Atlético-supporting elder son hung his head in shame. Perhaps his generation will desist.

Overt racism is beginning to show its face elsewhere too. Proof of its existence can be found, for the moment, in smallish items in the local news: a racist mugging; an attack on an immigrant girl; or racist insults from police officers. I have yet to see a police officer of non-Spanish origin, though the armed services has recruited vigorously amongst immigrants. In simple terms, that means they can die for Spain but cannot tell Spaniards what to do.

Racism is also slowly creeping its way into political discourse – even if it remains far behind the levels shown in other European countries from Scandinavia to Italy. It is not surprising that this should have happened first in Catalonia. In a region where defence of identity is a largely unquestioned part of mainstream politics, the arrival of people from other religions and cultures was always going to present a bigger challenge than elsewhere. Nor is it surprising that Vic, the romantic heartland of Catalonia, should be at the centre of it. In municipal elections in 2007, an openly xenophobic and anti-Muslim party, Plataforma per Catalunya came second in Vic. Interestingly, although its founder had a past as a pro-Francoist Spanish nationalist, it defined itself as an ‘identity’ party. It even called its junior wing ‘Identity Youth for Catalonia’.

By the time regional and town-hall elections were held in 2010 and 2011, race had become a major question in Catalonia – and was just beginning to appear in other parts of the country. A Catalan People’s Party politician, Xavier García Albiol, suggested some Romanian gypsies be run out of his home city of Badalona – and was voted in as mayor. The nationalists from Convergència i Unió, meanwhile, wanted to introduce a points system that would see those who learned to speak Catalan more likely to win permanent residency rights. All parties, except those on the far left and the separatists of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, embarked on a pursuit of the burqa and face veils – even though few were to be found on the streets.

Perhaps the most absurd example of this was in Tarrés, a delightful little village just a few miles from the Cistercian monastery at Poblet. With just 108 inhabitants, Tarrés has no Muslim inhabitants, but that did not stop parish councillor Daniel Rivera from tabling a debate on banning burqas and face-covering niqabs from the handful of municipal buildings – basically the town hall and the swimming pool – in 2010. ‘It’s true that there are no Muslims living in the village now, but this would be a preventive measure in case they come,’ he said when we met in the nearby provincial capital of Lleida. Rivera’s xenophobic Partit per Catalunya was a breakaway from the Plataforma party in Vic. No one was quite sure how he got elected to the Tarrés council – as he did not live there – and, in the end, the village refused to debate his idea. ‘Not so long ago all the old women in Tarrés wore head-scarves too, but they have disappeared without anyone banning them,’ said a local waiter, Arnau Galí. ‘The problem here has always been emigration, not immigration.’ But Lleida formally passed a ban that year, with women found wearing burqas in publicly owned buildings liable to fines of up to six hundred euros. Socialist mayor Angel Ros insisted that this was progressive politics. ‘This is about equality between men and women. The burqa and the niqab are symbols of the political use of a religious dogmatism that had begun to appear in Lleida,’ he told me, referring to a fundamentalist imam, Abdelwahad Houzi, who was stirring things up in a city whose Muslim population had reached 21 per cent. ‘This is not Islamophobia. When the right does this it is guided by xenophobia, but we are guided by equality,’ Ros insisted. In fact he seemed more guided by a race amongst local politicians to be the first to impose a ban. Soon these were being slapped into place across the region – from Barcelona to Tarragona.

On Lleida’s Nord street, home to Houzi’s mosque and a smattering of halal butcheries, Abderrahim Boussira, an Algerian who ran the Western Union store from which immigrants sent money home, said the fuss was disproportionate to the problem. ‘I’ve been here twenty years and I have never seen a woman in a burqa,’ he said. But Khadija Rabhi, an elegant, Moroccan-born shop owner with her hair in a hijab headscarf, said there were a few burqa wearers. ‘Some are Spanish converts. The Qur’an says we should dress modestly. But people have different interpretations. I wear a headscarf, and if I was not allowed to wear it, I would prefer to move to Morocco – even though Lleida has always been my home.’

‘It is not as if everyone in Lleida was worried about this,’ said Abdelraffie Ettalydy, head of an immigrants’ association. ‘In five years, I have only bumped into one of these women once.’ But Houzi’s followers did not escape his criticism. ‘They are simple people who say: “We are Muslims, so we are better than them”. That is why the mosque has become a problem for the city, and now for Catalonia and Spain as well.’ In a Spain traumatised by the Madrid bomb attacks, the Lleida example is a grim sign of things to come. The mayor may think he is being progressive – but a large section of the city’s population believes it has been targeted purely because of its religion. Further conflict seems inevitable.

Racist parties are crowing. ‘Measures we proposed three or four years ago that were greeted with cries of “racism” are now being passed by town halls,’ said Joan Terré, a town councillor for Partit per Catalunya in Cervera. He is right. In 2010 the People’s Party, with backing from Convergència i Unió, passed a motion through Spain’s senate that called on the government to prohibit women from wearing burqas and face-covering niqabs anywhere in public. The non-binding motion had to be carefully phrased to avoid the ban applying to the tens of thousands of Christian nazarenos who don hooded robes and parade through Spanish cities every Easter. ‘At this rate we will end up with more bans than burqas,’ quipped the then immigration minister, Celestino Corbacho, himself a former Catalan mayor. The Socialist government simply ignored the motion. But the Partido Popular is now in power. It has yet to be seen whether the government led by Mariano Rajoy will impose a blanket ban. The prime minister fits the retranca stereotype of his native Galicia perfectly. He is a master of political ambiguity whose ability to convince people of differing, or even opposite, beliefs that he agrees with them is legendary.

Given the degree of alienation obviously felt by both Muslims in Lleida and some of the 11-M train bombers, it seems obvious that Spain has a lot more to do before these immigrants feel properly accepted. The building of new mosques, already a subject of controversy in many places, may soon become a focus for conflict. Even amongst the Latin Americans, who are culturally so close to Spaniards, there is now concern that a new PP government will force some people out. As family members struggle to find work in 2012, Carmen Tejada is worried it will crack down on immigrants without jobs. Her joint Peruvian-Spanish nationality has to be renewed every ten years. ‘I know people who are having to go home because they can’t renew their Spanish passports,’ she told me recently. ‘If you haven’t got a job, they make it more difficult.’ She wonders whether she should not have opted for sole Spanish nationality when the opportunity had presented itself.

The arrival of the mild-mannered but tenacious Rajoy brought an end to a period characterised by growing social tolerance and expansion of the welfare state. Zapatero’s social revolution – with the introduction of gay marriage, attempts to distance the Church from education and looser laws on both divorce and abortion – may have enraged the more conservative parts of Spanish society, but it had been broadly welcomed. It was part of a thirty-year advance of social liberalism that had even turned Spain into a refuge for those living in more conservative countries. One of the Zapatero government’s last acts was to award Spanish nationality to Ricky Martin, a global music star of Puerto Rican origin, who was reportedly looking for a country where he could feel comfortable being married to a male partner.

Zapatero’s social successes contrasted, however, with his catastrophic handling of the economy. In 2008, just after he won a second term in office, the economy nose-dived. The global credit crunch and fall-out from the collapse of Wall Street financial services firm Lehman Brothers tipped Spain into recession. But that only revealed a far worse problem – a vastly inflated housing bubble that immediately burst. Suddenly there were 700,000 unsold newly built homes on the market. Residential building ground to a halt, pushing hundreds of thousands of construction workers out of jobs. The boom, egged on by corrupt town halls and bankers too willing to lend money to real-estate developers, also left deep problems in the financial sector. Worst of all, it exposed the parlous state of Spain’s education system, which had dumped one-third of its pupils onto the labour market with no qualifications. While unskilled labourers could find jobs on building sites, that was not a problem. But as Spain struggled to rein in its deficit, public spending on new motorways, high-speed rail lines, airports and museums – the shiny monuments, including many a white elephant, of successful Spain – also dried up. With no building sites or public works programmes to go to, a mass of unskilled workers struggled to find jobs.

Late in 2011, as Spain dropped back into recession for the second time in three years, I sat on a bench in the sunlit square of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Benalup, a charming pueblo in the bull-rearing country of Cadiz. A few years earlier it had boasted the highest number of top-of-the-range cars in the province. By November 2011 it had Spain’s highest unemployment rate – approaching 40 per cent. Just a few years earlier 80 per cent of Benalup had worked in construction. ‘I just wish I had stayed at school,’ said Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, a nineteen-year-old who – after being held back two years – never progressed beyond the level of a fourteen-year-old. ‘They don’t even know how to write a sentence properly,’ town councillor Vicente Peña complained. ‘People here blame the town council when things go wrong, but what about parents and schoolteachers? Surely they share the blame,’ another councillor, this time a socialist, said. A look at the distribution of school drop-out rates around Spain reveals just how damaging the so-called ladrillo (brick) boom was to the country’s educational and long-term prospects. For the rate was highest not in the poorest regions, but in those – like Andalucia, Valencia, Murcia and the wealthy Balearic Islands – that built the most.

Ladrillo had another poisonous effect as a catalyst for the unhealthy, often corrupt, relationship between town halls and construction companies who raped the once beautiful Mediterranean coast. The dam holding that corruption out of sight finally burst in March 2006. It did so, inevitably, in Marbella, a place administered by those politicians who had learned their trade from the biggest rogue of all, former mayor Jesús Gil. Police arrested the mayoress – a second-rate folk-singer called Marisol Yagüe – and a dozen town councillors from three separate parties. The town hall was so rotten with corruption that a board of administrators had to be appointed to run it. They inherited a planning nightmare, with thousands of illegal homes under threat of being bulldozed. Evidence at the trial points to a very simple system which Gil’s former right-hand man, Juan Antonio Roca, used to run the town. He took in money from builders and handed it out, in regular instalments, to councillors. When he fell out with a mayor he made sure the councillors on his payroll voted him out. Those councillors also saw to it that illegal building licences and contracts for town services went to Roca’s friends. Yagüe received some 1.8 million euros over three years. The relationship was so close that when she wanted yet more plastic surgery, Roca picked up the bill. Even one Marbella judge – who allegedly had part of his new house paid for by Roca – joined those accused of corruption.

The arrests in Marbella opened the floodgates. Suddenly mayors, councillors and building developers around Spain were being picked up for similar crimes. At the same time corruption cases began to blossom in regional governments from Valencia and the Balearic Islands to Andalucia. Even the monarchy found itself being dragged into the dirt, with the king’s son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarín, Duke of Palma, accused of cashing in on the largesse of some of the more corrupt administrations. At the time of writing there is feverish speculation over whether the duke, who denies wrongdoing, will be indicted for his dealings with the Balearic Island and Valencia governments. Little surprise, perhaps, that in a poll at the end of 2011 Spaniards should, for the first time since pollsters began asking the questions, give the monarchy a score below 50 per cent on ‘trust’ (the press did better). More worrying is the reaction of Spanish voters to corruption. As often as not, they have simply voted back the same people who had been lining their pockets.

Corruption was one of the drivers of a phenomenon that kicked off in Spain and, as the world’s financial centres were being targeted by protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement, soon spread around the globe. The indignados, or ‘indignant ones’, emerged in May 2011 after a handful of people decided to set up a protest camp in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol. When police arrested them thousands more came in their place. Within days tens of thousands of people were occupying the square and dozens of other squares around Spain. There was something uplifting about the protests – not in their political content, which was confused and directionless – but in their method. Peaceful and constructive, this was a generation of young Spaniards whom many commentators – including myself – had written off as spoilt, passive spectators. Here, at least, they were trying to have their say – an entire generation engaged with politics. Suddenly, they cared.

There was much to care about, and not just corruption. Unemployment crept ever higher and looked set to hit almost a quarter of the workforce by 2013. Without apartment blocks or motorways to build, Spain’s workforce must now compete with either better-educated northern Europeans or much cheaper labour in the developing world. It is, quite simply, not prepared. As my own children work their way through Spanish schools I, too, have become aware of the glaring weaknesses of a system in which pupils are tested externally only when – and if – they do university entrance exams. Every other exam, including the state bacca-laureate, is set and marked by their own teachers. A Spanish mania for old-fashioned cramming of facts has its advantages, but is accompanied by little in the way of skills-learning. Inside the classroom teachers are untouchable – regardless of how bad they might be. Outside it, they are an immovable corporatist block. Governments generally leave them alone. The only external valuation of their work comes in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) tri-annual PISA report. This places Spain below the OECD average on the key skills of reading, mathematics and science.

Zapatero reacted to the economic downturn by first denying Spain was in trouble and, later, by borrowing money to pump into the economy. He eventually accepted warnings that the markets thought Spain was living beyond its means. He was forced to impose the harsh measures insisted on by the euro currency zone’s heavyweights, led by German chancellor Angela Merkel. I once asked him, during an interview, if he felt there was anything at all left-wing remaining in his policies. ‘We haven’t cut spending on education … and we haven’t cut spending on health,’ he replied. But even that was not true. In Spain both education and health are run by the regional governments. These were being ordered to cut their budgets – and schools were suffering as a result. So, too, were health services. It was the price paid for the dilution of Spanish sovereignty that came with joining the euro. Economic policy was, in effect, being made outside Spain. Rajoy was similarly forced to act against his own liberal beliefs, raising direct taxes within just two weeks of taking office.

Sticking his head into the sand was Zapatero’s biggest mistake, but correcting that error is what eventually cost his party its worst results in the thirty-four years since democracy had been restored. Austerity and spending cuts helped produce mass unemployment and a second fall into recession. In 2009 a senior official at the General Workers’ Union told me that if unemployment went above 4 million, there would be a social revolution. By early 2012 the total was 5 million and rising. Little surprise, then, that Spaniards threw Zapatero’s Socialists out. In November 2011 they awarded Rajoy a landslide victory in the hope that he could fix the mess. At the time of writing, however, it remains unclear whether Spain will survive inside the euro zone – or even what shape that zone will take in the future. Neighbouring Portugal, Italy and Greece have all run into trouble. Spain has fewer problems than any of them, but might still be washed away in the flood.

The Rajoy government brought still greater austerity and more pain. It also set about reforming an economy that was clearly not competitive. Whether it will improve things, or make them worse (or one, then the other), only time can say. Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to meet and interview both Rajoy and Zapatero. One thing can certainly be said for both of them: they are honest men, neither of whom – despite the rampant corruption that blossomed at the level of regional governments and town halls during the boom years – would have taken a euro from the Spanish state for their own personal benefit. It is a characteristic, in fact, shared by all the prime ministers of Spain over the past thirty years. This is worth noting, if only because of a northern European tendency to lump southerners together as somehow lazy or venal. Spain, in this case, shares neither the high-level corruption of Italy, nor a history of falsifying the country’s accounts, like Greece. Nor has it frittered away its European funds, like Portugal. None of that means it will escape the fallout of the latest round of turbulence sweeping Europe. But it does hold out promise for finding a way back out again.

Although it is now fashionable to claim that nobody saw the oncoming disaster, that is not completely true. Government officials were already admitting that the housing bubble was beginning to deflate in 2007, though they hoped for a soft landing. That November I wrote an epilogue for the US edition of this book that summed up the size of the boom and captured the possibility that something might be about to go wrong – though I had no idea that, with the credit crunch around the corner, the change would be so calamitous.

If I feel a special affinity with Spain’s immigrants at this difficult time it is because I, too, am one of them – though my privileged circumstances have obviously made the experience different. One of the pueblos mentioned earlier in this book, Candeleda, has since become my second home. Even there, in a small country town well off the beaten track, Spaniards are learning to live with new neighbours from different cultures – be they Muslims, Latin Americans or Chinese. My new pueblo has been most welcoming to us all. In September 2008 I found myself squeezed into a tie and suit, sitting in the front pew of Candeleda’s church watching the novena – the final mass of a series of nine on consecutive days – while the town choir sang Bach. ‘I don’t believe in this stuff,’ admitted Mayor Miguel Hernández, a socialist and agnostic, who was sitting beside me. ‘But we have to be here.’ It was fiesta time. This was not the August affair when the town fills up with summer vacationers but the more intimate fiesta dedicated to the town’s patroness, a local Marian apparition dating back seven centuries and known as the Virgin of Chilla. The virgin’s fiestas are yet another excuse for a week of late-night partying, loud music in the town square and fun with fireworks, but – with the vacationers gone – they mainly attract townsfolk and people from round about. I was here as the pregonero. This is roughly the equivalent of the person who opens an English village fête, but with the added pomposity demanded by a fiesta that is both religious and a reaffirmation of municipal pride.

At midnight I stood in front of several thousand Candeledanos on a stage in the middle of the Plaza del Castillo. I avoided the long-winded, baroque format favoured by more traditional pregoneros and, in relatively few words, thanked them for welcoming people from so many different places and cultures into their previously homogenous community. I had been told to close my speech by calling out the three traditional vivas that mark the start of the fiestas. ‘¡Viva Candeleda!’ I shouted. ‘¡Viva!’ they roared back. I repeated the performance with ‘¡Vivan los Candeledanos!’ and ‘¡Viva la Virgen de Chilla!’ Each cry was greeted by a roar of ‘¡Viva!’ And each ‘¡Viva!’ was another Spanish arrow piercing my heart.

In a country given to such intense self-reflection about layers of identity it is, perhaps, not surprising that my own family’s idea of itself should be based on an increasingly complex mixture of culture, blood ties, history and loyalties. I was reminded of this on 7 July 2010, as we drove up La Castellana, the ten-lane boulevard that runs north–south through Madrid. Minutes earlier the Spanish soccer team had sealed its place in the World Cup final in South Africa by beating Germany. Carlos Puyol, the Barcelona centre-back, had flown across our television screen – all flowing, heavy-metal hair – to head in the only goal. Now the Spanish team had a chance to lift the World Cup for the first time ever. We took the car out, just as we had two years earlier when Spain became European soccer champions, to join in the honking, cheering, flag-waving celebrations that were bound to erupt across the city. I had not counted, however, on what the crowd who had watched the match on giant screens at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium would do. Rounding a corner we were met by a shirtless mass, flooding down the street, flags, banners and scarves waving. They blocked all the lanes and surged in a loud, euphoric flood of people towards the centre of town. In just a few minutes we were stuck in gridlock, fans clambering on the cars. Two Tremlett boys sat in the back, struck with awe.

Four days later we watched the final in a New Jersey suburb with a Mexican-American friend whose puffy eyes were proof that he really had, as he claimed, watched every match in the tournament. My children, clad in the red Spanish shirts of ‘la Roja’, were upset that we were not in Madrid to see a game that brought Spain to a grinding halt. So was I. When Andres Iniesta struck the only goal of the night in extra time, Spain went wild. A small corner of New Jersey also went mad – though only a few Latinos seemed to know why we were driving down their streets honking our car horn. That night the Empire State Building was lit up with the yellow and red colours of Spain. Sporting triumph is not so banal in a country where identity is a political battle zone. Some in Catalonia backed Holland against Spain in the final. But others reported that – for the first time in ages – they could walk proudly down a Catalan street with a red shirt and a Spanish flag, not worrying about the insults that might come their way from nationalists or separatists.

When ‘la Roja’ played against England recently, I discovered that I was the only person in my living room cheering the team in white shirts. Those who were small children when the first edition of this book was written are now young teenagers. Born and bred in Madrid, and with Spanish as their mutual language, they are clear about where their sporting loyalties lie. They carry British passports and speak mostly English at home, but their predominant culture is that of Spain. It is they who now correct my linguistic gaffes when I return from my weekly outings on Spanish television or radio (for I, too, have succumbed to the siren call of the broadcast tertulia). One son has professed a desire to take Spanish nationality. The other dreams of green English gardens. Their parents, too, wonder whether it is time to show a commitment to this country by taking up Spanish nationality. Unfortunately this cannot be shared jointly with British nationality, so the natural division will be for only one of us to become Spanish (and their mother has the better claim). None of this is certain, but it would bring to a full circle the journey started by Salvador Ripoll Moncho when he left the Alicante village of Tárbena for New York, Panama and, finally, Denia. Many decades later young Spaniards are, once more, packing their bags and seeking work abroad. I can only hope that these new Spanish emigrants receive the same warm welcome that I have felt in their country.