Page 28 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Spain

26  INTRODUCING SP AIN

Spanish team's win in the 2010 FIFA World
Cup, the country's first world title. Such
role models have encouraged participation
in sport and more facilities have been
provided to meet this demand. Most
popular are basketball and, above all, soccer.
Bullfighting remains popular with
some, although it does court controversy,
particularly with younger generations.
For aficionados, a corrida provides a link
to Spain’s roots, and the noise, colour and
crowd are as much of an attraction as
the bullfight itself. In Catalonia, however,
bullfighting was banned in 2012.

Spain Today
Since the mid-20th century, Spain has
undergone more social change than
Formula One driver Fernando Alonso anywhere in western Europe. Until the
1950s, Spain was predominantly a poor,
Spaniards are the most avid TV-watchers rural country, in which only 37 per cent of
in Europe after the British. There are two the population lived in towns of over
state-owned TV channels in Spain, as 10,000 people. By the 1990s, that figure
well as a growing number of private was 65 per cent. As people flooded into
channels and regional TV stations towns and cities, many rural areas became
thanks to digital platforms. Sports are depopulated. The 1960s saw the beginning
one of the mainstays of TV programming. of spectacular economic growth, partly
Spanish sportsmen and women have due to a burgeoning tourist industry.
been very successful – for example, tennis After the death of dictator General Franco
player Rafael Nadal and Formula 1 driver in 1975, Spain became a constitutional
Fernando Alonso, not forgetting the monarchy under King Juan Carlos I, who

A farmer with his crop of maize hanging to dry on the outside of his house in the hills of Alicante

022-027_EW_Spain.indd 26 10/11/2017 09:47