South of the Pyrenees lies the holidaymakers’ Utopia’, promised a 1958 Thomas Cook brochure: ‘a spectacular, flamboyant kingdom of the sun’. The kingdom was Spain, but the copywriter failed to mention that this particular ‘utopia’ also happened to be under the control of a fascist regime. When Francisco Franco died in November 1975 the enduring image of the country he had ruled for almost four decades was of a tourist’s paradise, not a totalitarian no-go area. Spain is now the world’s second most popular destination, with almost 100 million annual visitors.
The economic boom which occurred between 1959 and 1974 has been dubbed the ‘Spanish miracle’. It followed an era of political repression, shortages, and high unemployment, the result of Franco’s policy of economic autarky and the realities of international isolationism following the Spanish Civil War. The Stabilisation Plan of 1959 was a turning point, liberalising the economy and encouraging, rather than restricting, foreign trade. The ‘miracle’ also triggered the start of the apparently boundless growth of Spain’s tourism industry: having welcomed fewer than one million visitors in 1950, more than 30 million arrived in 1975. The scale of tourism’s impact on Spain’s built environment cannot be overstated, as anyone who has visited the Costa Blanca will know. In August 1971 the Daily Mail contrasted and compared a contemporary picture of Benidorm with one taken a decade earlier, asking ‘how a one-taxi town became Miami-by-the-Med’.
Making a difference
How did it? Tourism had been a priority for Nationalist Spain since the beginning; Franco’s forces founded a tourism department in 1938, even as the civil war raged on. Efforts were intensified with the foundation of the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1951, responsible for media censorship as well as for the tourist industry. Tourism was not only of economic importance: it was also a potential mouthpiece for propaganda. Under the leadership of the moderniser Manuel Fraga Iribarne , whose political career long outlasted the dictatorship , the ministry adopted the well-known (but somewhat ambiguous) ‘Spain is Different!’ slogan in the 1960s. The phrase attempted to exoticise select aspects of Spanish culture , bullfighting and flamenco dancing, for example , but it could also be read as a justification, Spain’s ‘difference’ excusing its seemingly archaic political system. For Spain and other illiberal regimes across Europe and beyond, mass tourism offered an opportunity to launder their international reputations while gathering reserves of foreign currency , provided they had the beaches, climate, or other natural resources likely to appeal to tourists. Fraga referred to the development of the tourist industry as a ‘call to crusade’, deliberately echoing the religious framing used by the Nationalist forces during the civil war.
The international nature of tourism also made it difficult for other countries to interfere. The British government sought to do just that after the closure of the border with Gibraltar in 1969. The Foreign Office and British embassy explored their options and concluded that, with regard to tourism, any ‘retaliation would harm British interests more than those of Spain’ due to the industry’s ability to employ foreign operators. The government never went beyond asking tourists to ‘think twice’ about visiting Spain.
Spain for you
Those who travelled to Spain during the 1960s and 1970s nonetheless encountered manifestations of the illiberal authority that governed the lives of those who lived there. What to Spaniards were everyday occurrences were to tourists remarkable events. The regime sought to influence travellers’ preconceptions and interpretations of the country, and in 1964 the Ministry of Information and Tourism issued a guidebook in English, French, and German with the title Spain for You. In many ways it was a traditional travel guide, with advice on how to prepare for a trip and what to see on arrival. Spain’s recent history was framed in a nuanced way; on the civil war, it called neither side entirely good or bad, but reassured travellers that it was won by ‘the people who preferred a Spanish Spain’ as opposed to those who wanted ‘Spain turned into a satellite of Russia’. The section on 1898 to 1939 was titled ‘politics at their worst’; the section from 1939 onwards ‘politics that work’. The book dismissed claims that the regime was in the habit of enforcing dress codes rooted in Catholic morality on visitors , ‘it goes without saying that you may dress as you please in Spain’ , though did add that ‘the best thing to do is to see what others are wearing when you get to a town or a beach’. The Spanish National Tourist Office on Jermyn Street, London , one of several outposts set up across northwest Europe and the US in the late 1950s , offered advice on ‘town and beachwear in Spain’ in their practical advice for tourists, also issued in 1964. Cyclists were advised that although they could wear tight-fitting shorts in Spain, they must change into trousers or long dresses when stopping in a town.
Endorsements of the regime’s benevolence could also be found in foreign guides. One British guide from 1957, Your Holiday in Spain and Portugal by Gordon Cooper, assured its readers that there was ‘no sign of a police state’. The book dismissed speculation that the Guardia Civil, a militarised police force founded in 1844 and known for its signature tricorn hats, acted as repressive enforcers of Franco’s authority. Those same rumours were described by Spain for You as ‘black literature built up abroad’.
Cold welcome
Despite this, the figure of the Guardia Civil loomed large in the recollections of those who visited Spain under Franco. In interviews I conducted with a range of British travellers who travelled to or lived in Spain during Franco’s regime, it becomes clear that ordinary tourists could be on the receiving end of the Guardia Civil’s authoritarian tactics. In 1971, aged 12, Andrea was taken to Spain on holiday by her parents and recalled one such encounter in Sitges. Her father was taking photographs when a policeman in a ‘really strange uniform’ threatened him with a rifle, accusing him of spying. The guardsman was only satisfied after ripping the film from the camera and confiscating it. Charlie described a similar encounter in a lively San Sebastian bar in 1973. Two guardsmen walked in and ‘the atmosphere just froze, everything was silent’. It remained that way until they left five minutes later. Some British travellers bore witness to Franco’s motorcade. Andrew was pulled over to the side of a road to Madrid in 1971: ‘There was literally a policeman, a Guardia Civil I suppose, standing every 100 yards on both sides of the road leaning on their rifles looking pretty bored … I think we travelled a couple of hours north with these policemen every couple of hundred yards.’ He added that this ‘was probably the only time on that trip that I felt, gosh, we’re living in a dictatorship’.
Such encounters could be serious. On 27 September 1965 Manuel Fraga was interviewed by the Evening News as ‘the man at the heart of the arrest storm’ after several British tourists were imprisoned for seemingly minor offences, including one 17-year-old boy accused of ‘insulting General Franco’ by calling him a ‘pig’. The boy, John Balson, was held for 17 days without the authorities informing the British government, leading to the launch of a European search effort. Fraga was indignant. He insisted that in the case of a group of British men violently assaulted by the police for ‘nude bathing at night’ that ‘the apology here should be on the British side’. On the Balson case specifically, Fraga remarked that he ‘was certain this boy was very badly behaved in the way he insulted General Franco’.
The suggestion, even promise, found in many brochures that to cross the Pyrenees was to ‘step back in time’ was also found to contain truth by British tourists; however, it could be true in different ways. Chris travelled to Spain with his parents in 1974. His mother was enthusiastic about medieval architecture, and he described their stay in the state-owned paradors in picturesque old towns such as Burgos, Segovia, and Santillana del Mar as ‘coloured through my mother’s romantic medieval lens’. Other travellers used the ‘back in time’ framing in a more pejorative way. Miriam recalled that the begging and poverty she saw in inland villages on a 1965 trip with her parents to the coastal resort of Roses in Catalonia ‘almost seemed to be from a previous century’.
Go home
British arrivals continued to rise as travel to Spain became more accessible in the 1980s and 1990s after Franco’s death. As Spain integrated politically and economically with the rest of Europe it could no longer market itself through ideas of ‘difference’. Its exotic image gradually gave way to one of affordability and reliability. But not everyone is happy: anti-tourism protests have intensified since 2024, particularly in hotspots such as Barcelona and the Balearic Islands, as protestors argue that property speculation and the growth of short-term rentals have driven out local people, turning historic centres into theme parks for tourists. Opposition to tourism in Spain is nothing new, but critics have historically attacked the perceived moral deficiencies of foreign visitors. In 1952 the mayor of Benidorm, Pedro Zaragoza, required Franco’s intervention to save him from excommunication from the Catholic Church after allowing the bikini to be worn in his town. In 1978 the prominent Spanish writer Rafael Abella criticised the foreign tourists, ‘dressed, if at all, in rags’, who were ‘invading Spain’. Spain’s booming, but controversial, tourist industry remains one of the lasting legacies of Franco in a country that is increasingly confronting its recent past.
James Howe teaches at the University of St Andrews.
