By Allan Wall
04/30/2023
Last month my two sons and I visited Spain. At 195,364 square miles, Spain is larger than California (163,696 square miles), so of course we didn’t see it all. But we saw a good amount of it.
We visited great cities and interesting towns. We passed through the rugged Spanish countryside: plains, fields, rivers, pastures, and mountains.
But in this same land as the great scenery and historical sites, The Dictadura Progre — Progressive Dictatorship — is taking over, not least through immigration.
In the Middle Ages, the ancestors of the Spaniards and Portuguese heroically fought for centuries to reconquer their peninsula from the Muslim Moors until 1492, when Spanish warriors prevailed at Granada. That was the same year Columbus sailed for the New World, after which Spain created Mexico and the other Spanish-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere.
But now Spain is now undergoing ideological and demographic transformations that could transform it into a very different sort of country. Or maybe not, if they can prevent it.
Our trip to Spain involved a simple plan: landing in Madrid, driving around the country, returning to Madrid, and flying out. And it worked.
Heading south in our rental car, we stopped at Puerto Lapice — mentioned by Spanish novelist Cervantes as the possible site of Don Quixote’s fictional attack on the windmills. We visited Cordoba and Seville in Andalusia, Medellin and Merida in Extremadura. We cut through Portugal and arrived in Galicia in Northwest Spain. We traveled east through Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country, from there to Zaragoza and back to Madrid.
Some Spanish cities were founded by the Romans, whose culture remains, millennia later, the principal element of Spanish culture. After all, Spanish grew out of Latin. Cordoba and Seville feature Roman ruins. The Moors occupied both, only to be reconquered by the Spaniards.
When the Spaniards reconquered a city from the Moors, they were very practical. Rather than destroy the Islamic architecture, they simply adopted and repurposed it. The great cathedral in Cordoba is a former mosque.
Cordoba is also famous for the sombrero cordobés, a famous hat with a flat brim, like the one Zorro wore. I purchased one… from a Chinese immigrant couple.
I later checked the tag and discovered that my “authentic Cordovan hat” was made in China. There’s some globalization for you.
Seville was the embarkation point for many of the conquistadors, explorers and settlers traveling to the New World. They sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the Atlantic and on to the Western Hemisphere.
Thus, fittingly, the tomb of Christopher Columbus himself is located inside the massive cathedral of Seville, the largest Gothic church in the world.
The great discoverer’s coffin is held aloft by figures representing the kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarre.
So far, I haven’t heard of any Antifa-type attacks on the tomb. But one can never rule that out.
Medellin in Extremadura has a population of only a few thousand, and you can easily walk around it. But Medellin has been in the thick of Spanish history since its foundation in Roman times.
It has a Roman theater that was excavated in the 20th century.
A Moorish castle-fortress recaptured and enlarged by the Spaniards overlooks the town from the top of a hill.
We were able to climb all over it, at our own risk of course.
The view of the Guadiana (river of ducks) valley was spectacular.
A battle was fought there during the Napoleonic Wars, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) the “Republicans” — the leftists — bombed a church there.
Medellin also is the hometown of Hernan Cortes, conqueror of the Aztecs and founder of Mexico. In the town plaza is a statue of Cortes, still a favorite son of Medellin.
I’m not a big fan of the European Union, but in Spain I saw some of its positive accomplishments.
The European Union financed the fine highways, similar to U.S. interstates, and Madrid’s relatively new Barajas Airport. I see why European countries value belonging to the E.U.: money, and lots of it. The European Union should stick to development projects like that, rather than subverting traditional European societies and bringing in hordes of non-Europeans.
Spaniards, as my elder son observed, resemble middle-class Mexicans. But in the last few decades, the immigrant population in Spain has exploded, from 1.6 percent in 1998 to 15.23 percent (7.23 million) in 2020.
We met a number of immigrants. Some are obvious — black Africans and Middle Eastern, chiefly. Latin American immigrants, depending on their race, blend in.
In a Burger King in Zaragoza I spoke with a Senegalese immigrant. His Spanish was good, so he’d been there a while.
The mysterious Basque people of northern Spain, with their strange non–Indo-European language, unrelated to any extant tongue spoken on earth today, have fascinated me ever since I read about them.
When we visited Bilbao, the biggest city in the Basque Country, we saw many African blacks, some dressed in their traditional garb. Muslims have even invaded the rural Basque country. One hopes the Basque people can preserve their unique culture, and that their homeland within Spain, the Basque Country, isn’t destined to become another target of the globalists’ Great Replacement.
Of course, Spain is still closely linked with Latin America’s Spanish-speaking nations. The cultural legacy of the Spanish Empire is so strong that, after all my years residing in Mexico, I felt at home, in a way, in Spain. I felt the same general ambience, the same cultural backdrop. At times, I had to remind myself that I was in Spain, not Mexico.
That’s why, by the way, relatively few Spaniards emigrated to the United States, even in the Ellis Island era. They preferred heading to Mexico, Cuba, Argentina or another Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere.
We visited Galicia, the northwest part of Spain. My wife’s last Spanish ancestor was a great-grandfather who left Galicia in the 1890s. We visited his hometown, the city where he studied medicine, and the port city from whence he sailed to the Western Hemisphere. He landed in Mexico, where he married my wife’s future great-grandmother. He spent most of the rest of his life there. He was a refugee in El Paso, Texas, during the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the 20th century.
That was back when being a refugee meant seeking refuge while a war was going on, not staying indefinitely. He returned to Mexico when things cooled down.
As for the capital Madrid, we stayed a few nights and saw some of the sights. We visited the world-class Museo del Prado, Spain’s premier art museum, specializing in Spanish artists, especially Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) and Francisco Goya (1746-1828). I got in free because I’m a teacher!
We visited the royal palace, which allowed me to enter free as well.
Our last night in Madrid, we dined in the Sobrino de Botín, the world’s oldest restaurant in continuous operation, since 1725.
I also attempted to get an interview with the Vox party, but it didn’t work out [A Visit to Spain, Which Has Its Own Immigration Issues, by Allan Wall, Border Hawk, March 29, 2023].
Mexican cuisine and Spanish cuisine are not the same, though sharing some common elements. The Spanish ham is great, I could live off that.
Nowadays, Mexican restaurants are making inroads. I saw one in Seville and several in Madrid. I even met a Peruvian guitarist working in a Mexican restaurant in Madrid… playing the part of a Mexican guitarist.
American fast food restaurants are successful in Spain: Aside from Burger King, we saw KFC, Subway, Popeyes, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell. The stores feature Oreos and Snickers. Spaniards apparently like American snacks and fast food.
Even the Black Lives Matter has some influence in Spain, despite the country’s very different racial history. In Seville, I saw the acronym ACAB — “All Cops are Bastards” — incongruously scrawled on the wall of a narrow street.
Another bizarre note: In Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, where we visited the archives office of the university, a sign on the wall, written in Galician, not Spanish, which read Espazo Libre de Violencias Machistas — Space Free of Male Chauvinist Violences.
Three women and one man were working in the office. Quietly reading a document, the man was not, apparently, engaged in any sort of “male chauvinist violences.”
But that’s today’s Spain. The Dictadura Progre, the Progressive Dictatorship, is rapidly taking over. It’s Spain’s version of the Woke Mind Virus that has infected the West.
I would hate to see Spain, with all its fascinating history and culture, totally transformed. But like any Western country, it needs patriots to fight to defend it.
The Spaniards of old fought for centuries to reconquer their country from the Moors. I hope their descendants can reconquer contemporary Spain from the Dictadura Progre.
American citizen Allan Wall moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan‘s wife is from Mexico and is now a U.S. citizen, their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Border Hawk blog archive is here, his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.