One of the things I’m looking forward to, in walking the Camino, will be getting a close-up view of modern Spain.  Looking at a slice of England and Wales was a big part of my reason for researching and writing my book on the London to Holyhead road (“This Ancient Road” 2017, available online though sadly not from all good bookshops), along with the Roman remains and the industrial history.  And while much of the observation there was done from the car, this time we will be doing it at walking pace.

We last went to northern Spain in 1988, following the Camino route by car.  Perhaps because of the links through tourism, football, food, and dance, it feels as though Spain has always been a fellow open democracy.  In fact, in 1988, it had only been a democracy for 13 years, after 36 years of dictatorship under General Franco, and had only been an EU member since 1986. 

Economic prosperity was both fuelled and reflected in the development of the infrastructure.  Roads and hotels were sometimes pretty basic in 1988, but modernised rapidly afterwards, partly with EU money.  The length of the Spanish motorway network increased nearly four-fold between 1990 and 2015, and the pictures show a deliberately extreme contrast in the type of roads available.

Statistics only ever tell part of the story – that’s why I want to walk to see for myself – but the figures for those 30 years show striking changes.  Spain is relatively richer: the best overall measure of economic prosperity, output per head, shows Spain at 78% of the OECD average in 1988 and at 88% in 2018.  This conceals an even sharper rise and fall: at its peak in 2008, Spanish output per head was 96% of the OECD average, but the country suffered badly from the financial crash and the recession which followed.  Meanwhile, Spain has got bigger: the population has risen from 39 million to 47 million, with 5m of that growth occurring between 2000 and 2008, thanks to rapid immigration, though the rate of increase in Galicia (the region including Santiago), for example, was significantly lower.

A further important change since 1988 is that power is more devolved. Gradually, the regions took on more responsibility, eg for universities and aspects of health work, with more tax powers alongside.  By the mid 2000s, more OECD data suggested that only Canada and Australia were more decentralised.  The claims of some regions for greater autonomy is perhaps the dominant issue in Spanish politics today, thanks to the pressure for independence for Catalonia.  This bears out a prediction from John Hooper, in The New Spaniards: writing in 2006, he said that regional nationalism remained the “single biggest imponderable in Spain’s future”.  We took an earlier version of Hooper’s book, written when he was the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent, with us on the 1988 trip, and it was – and remains – a fascinating read.

For much of the time since 1988, Spain has been ruled by either the Socialists (PSOE) or the centre right People’s Party (PP).  More recently, as in some other European countries, things have become more complicated, with the emergence of more parties, partly under pressure from the Catalan independence movement, and the response made to it.  Not surprisingly, there are differences between the regions, and that will be the subject of another blog.