Spain Was Different: Tourism Under Franco
How did Spain, Western Europe’s last dictatorship, become one of its most popular tourist destinations?
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.
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