SPAIN
(See Cover)
On Madrid's broad Paseo de la Castellana, the heavy steel ball of a demolition crane slams relentlessly into the 19th century palace of the Marques de Selgas, making room for a high-rise apartment building. On the outskirts of the city, Dodge Darts are rolling out of a vast factory complex that less than a year ago was an empty field. Europe's biggest supermarket opened two years ago on the exclusive Calle Velázquez. In a dim, dark-paneled bar on the Avenida de las Americas, boys in long hair and girls in white Vartan stockings sit carefully cool and immobile as a yé-yé band blasts out a yeah-yeah beat.
Near Badajoz, on the bitter western plateau that the Spaniards named Extremadura because life there was so extremely hard, irrigation has transformed into 5,000 gardens of vegetables and cotton the chalky arid land whose owners were half starved a decade ago. In her new white stucco farmhouse, a wife pauses under a gaudy framed print of Jesus to explain why she has not yet bought a television set: "The neighbors would come in every night and track up my floor."
In Seville, bull breeders in flat-brimmed hats still sip cognac in sidewalk cafés, and aging horses still pull ancient carriages along streets lined with orange trees toward the world's largest Gothic cathedral. But across the Guadalquivir, tens of thousands of spinning bobbins turn raw cotton and wool into finished fabric in one of Europe's largest textile plants. In the main square of Cordoba, an Arab caliphate for 250 years, a transcribed electric guitar chimes the hour in flamenco rhythm. In Bilbao, shipyards work round the clock to keep pace with orders for merchant vessels from all over the world—including Communist Poland and Cuba. "Everything is changing in Spain," says Industrialist Eduardo Barreiros. "The commotion is from top to bottom and bottom to top."
Over the Line. It certainly is. After long years of isolation and decay, Spain is caught up in an industrial revolution that has made it the fastest-growing nation in Europe and is rapidly changing the structure of its society. In the past six years, thousands of new enterprises have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs that have drawn millions of Spaniards from their pueblos to the cities. Foreign investment is coming in. Gross national product has soared 65% since 1960; per-capita income last year passed the mystical $500 dividing line that supposedly separates the "rich" nations from the "poor."
The new prosperity has brought greater opportunity. Blue-collar workers are finding it easier to improve themselves and are forming the beginnings of a mass middle class. They are more acquisitive, not only because they can afford to buy more but also because more can be bought and more easily. The installment plan, introduced eight years ago and now a national institution, has put gas stoves, electric refrigerators and washing machines—now mass produced in Spanish factories—within the range of most city dwellers, and 40% of Spanish families now own a television set.
"We have gone from shoe leather to traffic jams overnight," says a conservative Barcelona banker, and the analogy is apt. Ten years ago, Spain produced no automobiles, and foreign cars were so expensive (the import duty