In Focus - Discover Spain: Experience the Best of Spain - page 581

secondary schools entrusted to the Jesuits, divorce made illegal and church wed-
dings compulsory.
During WWII Franco flirted with Hitler (although Spain watched the war from the
sidelines), but Spain was desperately poor to the extent that the 1940s are known
as los años de hambre (years of hunger). Despite small-scale rebel activity, ongo-
ing repression and international isolation (Spain was not admitted to the UN until
1955), an economic boom began in 1959 and would last through much of the
1960s. The recovery was funded in part by US aid, and remittances from more than
a million Spaniards working abroad, but above all by tourism, which was developed
initially along Andalucía's Costa del Sol and Catalonia's Costa Brava. By 1965 the
number of tourists arriving in Spain was 14 million a year.
But with the jails still full of political prisoners and Spain's restive regions straining
under Franco's brutal policies, labour unrest grew and discontent began to rumble
in the universities and even in the army and Church. The Basque-nationalist terror-
ist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA; Basque Homeland and Freedom) also ap-
peared in 1959. In the midst of it all, Franco chose as his successor Prince Juan
Carlos, the Spanish-educated grandson of Alfonso XIII, the Bourbon king deposed
by Republicans in 1931. In 1969 Juan Carlos swore loyalty to Franco and the Movi-
miento Nacional, Spain's fascist and only legal political party. Franco died on 20
November 1975.
Spain's Democratic Transition
Juan Carlos I, aged 37, took the throne two days after Franco died. The new king's
links with the dictator inspired little confidence in a Spain now clamouring for demo-
cracy, but Juan Carlos had kept his cards close to his chest and can take most of
the credit for the successful transition to democracy that followed. He appointed
Adolfo Suárez, a 43-year-old former Franco apparatchik with film-star looks. To
general surprise, Suárez got the Francoist-filled Cortes to approve a new, two-
chamber parliamentary system, and in early 1977 political parties, trade unions and
strikes were all legalised and the Movimiento Nacional was abolished. After elec-
tions in 1977, a centrist government led by Suárez granted a general amnesty for
acts committed in the civil war and under the Franco dictatorship. In 1978 the Cor-
tes passed a new constitution making Spain a parliamentary monarchy with no offi-
cial religion and granting a large measure of devolution to Spain's regions.