La España austera

From the disappearance of the ration cards in 1952 until Franco's death in 1975, the so-called "Spanish miracle" took place. If hunger was not just a bad memory in the early 1950s, in the mid-1970s the levels of well-being were more than remarkable. In between, a broad middle class had emerged as never before in our history. Unfortunately, the enormous economic progress was not accompanied by public liberties and citizen rights, constrained by a dictatorship that was not so monolithic as has sometimes been said. Austere Spain is a pleasant approach to the daily life of those years: from housing, food, hygiene, clothing and its strenuous use, to the different forms of leisure and rest (holidays, soccer, television, cinema, parties and celebrations) going through the suffocating moral, teaching, humor or the courtship and marriage of the Spanish. All these changes took place at the time that tourism became an important source of foreign exchange and a solvent for the mentality of the Spaniards who saw exotic neighbors appear on their gray horizon from those who had been artificially separated for decades. With his characteristic informative style, José Calvo Poyato offers us here a documented look at the Spain of our parents and grandparents, of the years that laid the essential foundations for later prosperity. A handful of little-known images complement the portrait of that quarter-century that changed Spain forever.