Los ingenieros de Franco

The main objective of this book, the author tells us, "is not to write a history of science and technology under Francoism (which was also the case), but rather to try to understand its role in the constitution of the new regime." In its pages, he talks about hybrid rice seeds or prestressed concrete beams, carbon and enriched uranium, plans for a church and maps of currents and tides, as features of "a portrait of Francoism attached to material transformations , inevitably assembled to the social and ideological structures». That is why he also talks to us about Opus Dei and National Catholicism, about vertical unions and Franco's swamps, about the Spanish-American pacts and Gibraltar, about the Doñana Park and the WWF, or about the conflict in Western Sahara. From the difficult years of autarky to periods more marked by the Cold War and world markets, the panorama provided by this study is different from the usual one: in it, scientific and technical research appears, not as a simple tool of power, but as a as a «constituent element... that gave content to the regime».