Ghosts of Spain

It is customary for a certain kind of educated Englishmen to adopt a Mediterranean country as his spiritual home at some point in his life. Giles Tremlett, the Guardian's long standing correspondent in Madrid, has settled on (and settled in) Spain, in recent history perhaps not the most fashionable choice, owing to its enduring association with the more uneducated sort of Englishman.

Only the first third of the book is really about the ghosts of Spain's past. The rest is a region by region survey of the contemporary aspects of his new homeland that Tremlett has yet to assimilate into his ordered anglosajón soul. It's rather like a letter addressed to one's beloved that starts "I love you to bits but..."

There's hardly any thematic unity behind these essays on Spain's hidden present, which makes the reading experience rather like settling down to work one's way through a bulky, single-topic newspaper. Yet dotted around the saggier parts of Tremlett's exposition are some very lively ancecdotes. For me the stand-out examples were these:

The journalist was apartment-hunting out in Madrid with his young daughter and was taken by an estate agent to see one smart residence. On entering the living room he found that it was "dominated by a life-size portrait of a man in a Second World War German uniform." Adolf Hitler. Nearby there was a glass cabinet with an iron cross, a falangist red beret and a picture of King Juan Carlos. The estate agent had warned him about the "old fashioned" decor.

Pedro Almodóvar has fessed up to Spanish media that his last unrealised "erotic fantasy is to go on a bus, pass by a school, and to see, for example, a father of about thirty-eight picking up his thirteen year old daughter. What I would really like to do is to go to bed with the father and the daughter at the same time, because I like pubescents a lot, and their fathers, even those with respectable jobs that give them a bit of a paunch."

There is also the story of Hildegart Rodriguez, "the red virgin" a young girl brought up as an intellectual prodigy by her mother Aurora, a woman who denied that women have souls, but had determined to bring up her first born as a super-being almost from the moment of conception. Hildergart could speak French, English and German by the age of eight and joined the Socialist party at fourteen. She published books, gave speeches and founded a league for Sexual Reform. Yet when she informed her mother that she intended to leave her to visit H.G. Wells and other thinkers in London Aurora shot her as she slept, one bullet in the head and three in the chest.

I also enjoyed the chapter on the Costa del Sol megalopolis, set to become Spain's largest city, and already home to more UK passport holders than Cardiff.

In the late seventies I spent a few summers at the recently opened Marbella Club, pet project of the late Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe-Langenburg Iturbe "principal promoter of sunny Marbella in Spain." Back then Marbella was still more or less the cosmopolitan arcadia that a young Alfonso had imagined, but by the time my father decided to buy a house in an urbanisation a few minutes drive to the east of the old town, it had become permantly joined to wide boy playgound Puerto Banus by dense sprawl of little white villas called Nueva Andalucia and the cosmopolitans had given way to oafish catetos (and more seasonally, the gilded tryrants of Arabia) One of Alfonso's final remarks about the little monster he had created was "If I could destroy the horrors of Marbella I would do so. But I suspect I would need a lot of dynamite."

I had a last look myself on January 2, 2004 when V and I spent the night in Marbella after celebrating the New Year in Spain. We drove up the hill to our old house, and I noted sadly how the olive trees that had lined the road were gone along with two old derelict farmhouses. In a deep groove in the hillside there ran a new motorway which crossed us perpendicularly, halfway between the coast and the summit, which still affords an unspoilable view of the western Med, which on a crystal clear winter morning appears as a vast, shimmering lake bordered to the south by the craggy Atlas mountains of Morocco.

Tremlett explains how the need to reclassify land from rural to urban utilisation has fed an "unbreakable cycle" of corruption along Spain's southern coastline. Nor are there any shortage of examples from other parts of the country. Real Madrid's spending spree on Galacticos was funded by €390 pelotazo involving the sale of the club's training ground to developers. The deal was conceived by the then club president Florentino Perez, a construction magnate who had in mind a team full of flesh and blood brands like Ronaldo and Beckham who would increase Real's global earning potential, regardless of their collective performance on the pitch.