Just finished reading Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett, The Guardian’s Madrid correspondent and a longtime resident of Spain. I picked it up at the FNAC in Alicante a few weeks ago, while looking for some books on Spanish grammar. The back cover seemed interesting, and I was temporarily short on reading material (most of my stuff is still in the Netherlands). Altough I find most travel books to be rubbish, this seemed different. In one sense, it is a travel book, as Tremlett takes the reader around Spain: Madrid, Barcelona and Catalunya, Seville and Andalucía, Galicia, the Basque Country, the Costa Blanca (the region where I now live) and elsewhere. But his purpose is not so much to tell us about the places; rather, he visits them with a purpose–to explain the history of Spain, particularly the consequences of the Civil War, and to search for the features in the Spanish national character that make this country and its people unique. And because Tremlett is a journalist, he writes in an eminently readable style. The book deals with difficult topics, and in depth, and yet it reads almost like a novel.
For me it was particularly interesting to see how the impressions of someone who has lived here for 20 years compare to my own, much shorter experience (besides holidays, my experience in Spain before I started my new job here on October 1st is limited to an 11-month stint working as an interim manager in Seville in 2003-2004). I was struck (and flattered!–because I had had the same thought) by one of Tremlett’s observations in the final chapter, “Moderns and Ruins”: in many ways, the way the Spanish treat space is more similar to the United States than to the rest of Europe. Spain is a big country, and the population density is much lower than in Northern Europe. When I came to the Netherlands in 2003 I was struck by how efficiently space is used there: inside houses, every square centimeter is used for something, whether living space or storage; and outside, the houses often occupy most of the small parcels they are located on. This makes obvious sense in a small country with 16 million inhabitants. Spain has 43 million or so, but its land area is about 12 times the size of the Netherlands. And with most of the population living in the cities, this means that rural Spain has the same kind of semi-deserted feel to it as parts of the US. Unfortunately it also means that there is the same kind of disregard for the land: one sees unofficial garbage dumps, abandoned buildings, unplanned towns–things that to a newly arrived Northern European are unusual and jarring.
Anyway, for anyone interested in really learning about modern Spain and its historical background, this book is one of the best places to start. It is available on Amazon and I am sure plenty of other places as well.