Our Spanish character has changed – we've left the xenophobic machismo of the Franco era behind
Stereotypes stick in the mind like parasites: it's easier to increase a country's GDP per head twelvefold – in the last 40 years Spain's has gone from $2,413 to $29,651 – than to eliminate our neighbours' prejudices about us.
Take the business of women murdered by their partners. I'm sick of repeating, to the amazement of foreigners and Spaniards alike, that if the issue of domestic violence seems ever present in the country, it's not because we're rampant barbarians who kill more women than anyone else; on the contrary it's because Spain has led the way in recognising and taking a stand against this savage behaviour.
Moreover, according to the Reina Sofía Centre's third international report on violence against women, which analyses 40 countries (others, including the likes of France, are not included because they don't publish data on male violence), Spain comes in last place for the number of female murders, with 3.5 deaths per million inhabitants a year.
In the United States the level is 9.1 per million; in Germany, 4.6 per million; in Britain, 4.4; in Norway, 5.5 per million; in Finland, 9.6. In the cool-headed, civilised, fair-minded countries of the north, there are far more victims.
For many it would be more fitting if Spain – the land of bullfighting – was also notable for cutting the throats of its red-blooded womenfolk, as depicted in the opera Carmen – written, lest you forget, by French composer Georges Bizet – but the ineluctable fact is that the Nordic peoples are, according to the data, much more prolific killers.
I wonder if this could be the result of a deadly mix of higher alcohol consumption with a bitterness engendered by the progress of feminism in these countries; but that's a matter for another time. It's true that until relatively recently Spain was chauvinistic and backward, yet it's equally true that there have been dramatic changes in the last 40 years. Today we have as much in common with Carmen as conceived by Prosper Mérimée (he wrote the novella on which the opera is based) as we do with a Mongolian tribe.
We're anything but puritanical in our sexual and other habits, partly because – if you'll allow me to shatter another cliche – we're not very religious, either. Over the last 15 years the number of people taking up religious vocations has fallen by 30%, and Catholic schools have lost more than 500,000 pupils. Only 34% of taxpayers now opt to contribute part of their payment to the church.
In this context, successive laws have begun to enshrine what I believe are the broad sentiments of Spanish people. For instance, there's the law of equality, which regulates everything from parental leave to gender equality in the electoral roll. Or the most recent abortion law, which allows pregnancy to be terminated during the first 12 weeks without specific justification. Or that of homosexual marriage, supported by 66% of the population, which saw 4,500 marriages in the year after it came into effect.
The fact is that Spain is no longer notable for its machismo, when compared with its European neighbours. Which is impressive, when you consider that before May 1975 a married woman in Spain was not permitted to buy a car, open a bank account or get a job without prior permission from her husband. We've covered a huge distance – and at great speed.
The dizzying social changes have continued apace during the last decade, with the huge influx of migrants. In just over 10 years, 5.7 million foreigners – some 14% of the total population – have entered the country, and we've gone from being a very uniform society to one that's distinctly multicultural.
In absolute terms we're 10th in the world by number of immigrants and, as you'd expect, this is changing what it means to be Spanish. Not even bullfighting is what it was, and that's not just because Catalonia has made it illegal: the figures show a marked decline in its popularity, which in any case is not great – at between 28% and 37% of the population, according to different polls.
Just one Spanish institution seems unassailable. We have double the European Union average number of bars – some 340,000. Until only very recently we were top of the list of number of bars per head. But with its 2004 entry into the EU, Cyprus has knocked us into second place. How dare they?
Rosa Montero is a novelist and journalist for El País. Translation by Andrew Staffell