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SPANISH HISTORY

How Spain celebrates its National Day (and why not everyone is happy about it)

Thursday October 12th 2023 marks National Day in Spain, a public holiday across the country. But what's Spain's 'Día de la Hispanidad' all about and why do some critics want it banned?

How Spain celebrates its National Day (and why not everyone is happy about it)
King Felipe VI of Spain (C) reviews the troops during the Spanish National Day military parade in Madrid on October 12, 2022. (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO CANAS / AFP)

How do people usually celebrate National Day in Spain?

The biggest event on National Day in Spain is a massive military parade along Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana – it is also Armed Forces Day.

The army, navy, air force, Guardia Civil and even the Spanish Legionnaires – who even bring with them their goat mascot –  come out in force to march along the capital’s grandest thoroughfare.

King Felipe VI, who is head of the armed forces, attends with Queen Letizia and their daughters, as well as the Prime Minister, leading politicians, and foreign dignitaries.

The culmination of the event is a fly-by from the Spanish Air Force acrobatics team, the Patrulla Águila, who release a stream of crimson and gold smoke to replicate Spain’s national flag across the sky.

Celebrations also usually take place in other parts of Spain. Málaga holds a military procession in its Parque Huelin. Huelva also hosts a big celebration, as does Zaragoza, where the cathedral is dedicated to Our Lady of the Pilar, the patron of the Spanish Guardia Civil and of the Hispanic world.

Many families, especially those connected to the military, will turn out to watch the parades, but for the most part people will see it as a day off and do what people do best on a holiday: sleep late, enjoy a long lunch or escape the cities for a long weekend.

The goat of the Spanish Legion gears up for action at 2015's National Day Parade. Photo: Carlos Teixidor Cadenas/Wikipedia
The goat of the Spanish Legion gears up for action at the National Day Parade. Photo: Carlos Teixidor Cadenas/Wikipedia
 

What will happen on National Day in Spain in 2023?

This year’s National or Hispanic Day celebrations in Madrid will see the usual crowds gather along Madrid’s emblematic Paseo de la Castellana to watch the military parades and air shows, and perhaps even catch a glimpse of King Felipe and the Spanish royal family. 

2023’s military parade will start at 11am on Thursday October 12th on Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana.
 

Some of Madrid’s top museums will also be free to the public on Thursday, including Museo Sorrolla, Reina Sofía, El Prado, Museo de América and the city’s archaeological and anthropological museums.

There will also be plenty of other events taking place across Madrid to mark the occasion, from concerts to street theatre and other performances.

You can expect a similar celebratory atmosphere across many of Spain’s big cities, from free entrance to emblematic buildings in Valencia to hot-air balloon trips in Seville. Here is a detailed breakdown of everything happening across Spain on Thursday October 12th. 

As Spanish patriotic displays go, Spain’s National Day is as big as it gets. 

However, not everybody is happy Spain’s Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Day) exists.

So why does Spain celebrate it?  And why do some of its critics want it banned?

A bit of history

There may not be much mention of the explorer himself on the day, but the date October 12th commemorates the so-called ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish). 

On that day in 1492 a Spanish expedition led by Columbus arrived to what today is known as San Salvador, in the Bahamas, and made the first step towards what would become the Spanish empire.

Catalans against independence took to the streets for a pro-Spain rally in Barcelona. Photo: AFP
 

Spain conquered parts of present-day United States and most territories across South America.

Together with other territories that the Spanish realm had already conquered, it made el imperio español the greatest of its time.

Hispanic Day also commemorates the unification of the realms of Castilla and Aragón, which eventually became the Spain we know today, an event that happened earlier in 1492 after the Spanish army reconquered Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Europe.

El Día de la Hispanidad was first celebrated in Madrid in 1935 and was made an official public holiday in 1981.

In 1987, its name was changed to La Fiesta Nacional (Spain’s National Day), removing any reference to Spanish colonialism.

The controversy

There is a lot of controversy around this celebration in Spain, and no surprise to learn that the biggest criticism comes from Catalonia, the region where part of the population is pushing for independence.

READ ALSO: Catalans march for unity on Spain’s national day

 While some Catalans opposed to breaking away from Spain rally to celebrate Spain’s National Day, others rally against it.

Some town halls and companies refuse to observe it as a holiday and instead changed the day off work to October 1st – La Diada, Catalonia’s National Day – when protests are also held to mark the anniversary of the 2017 referendum on independence declared unconstitutional by Madrid.

READ MORE: Badalona cancels Columbus holiday ‘glorifying genocide’

Some political parties in the Basque Country and Navarra also refuse to mark Hispanic Day. Basque nationalists are absent for the same reason as the Catalan separatists and in Navarra, the regional government replaced the Día de Hispanidad with the Day of Indigenous Peoples.

Members of far-left party Unidas Podemos have also previously strongly disagreed with the October 12th celebration, refusing over the years to take part in the official event, partly because it is led by the King, and they are a Republican party. They also argue that celebrating Columbus Day would mean celebrating the genocide that followed his discovery of “the new world”.

When ex-Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias became Deputy PM as part of his party’s governing coalition with the PSOE, he did however take part in the official event.

But in many Republicans’ minds the day still has strong associations with the Francoist era when the dictator used the celebration to display his military might and extol the values of the dictatorship.

And how about Latin Americans themselves, you may ask? Well, for years several countries on the continent whose indigenous ancestors were subdued, enslaved or killed by Spanish conquistadores have questioned whether this Hispanic heritage is worth celebrating.

Recent socialist governments have in many cases ditched the original name of the celebration, El Día de la Raza (The Day of Race, the Spanish race that is), coined by a Spanish minister in 1913. 

In Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner changed it to ‘Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity’, Rafael Correa decreed that in Ecuador it would be renamed ‘Day of Interculturality and Plurinationality’. The governments of Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela called it ‘Day of Indigenous Resistance’, Morales in Bolivia renamed it ‘Day of Decolonisation’ and in Peru they celebrate the ‘Day of Indigenous Peoples and Intercultural Dialogue’.

On the other hand, the United States still calls October 12th Columbus Day and other American nations have stuck by the original ‘Spanish race’ name.

Changing the narrative of Spanish colonisation to emphasise the struggle of the continent’s indigenous does seem to be the trend nonetheless.

But not all Spanish politicians agree with tainting Spain’s history. In late September 2022, following Pope Francis’s apology for the evangelisation “sins” committed by the Church during the conquista, Madrid’s regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso slammed the pontiff.

“It surprises me that a Catholic who speaks Spanish says this about a legacy like ours, after all our missions brought Spanish and Catholicism – and with them civilisation and freedom – to the American continent”.

For members

SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why the Basque Country is the strike capital of Spain

Around half of all strikes in Spain take place in the Basque Country, but it wasn't always that way.

Why the Basque Country is the strike capital of Spain

Though airport workers are currently striking in Valencia and Madrid, and trade unions have played a leading role in the farmers’ protests across the country in recent weeks, there’s a specific part of Spain that stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to industrial action — the Basque Country.

According to figures from the Basque government’s Labour Relations Council (CRL), in 2023 almost half (46 percent) of the total strikes called in Spain took place in the Basque Country.

In 2022, that figure was 50.36 percent. That is to say, a region with less than 5 percent of the country’s total population had half of its strikes. More specifically, 342 of the 679 strikes that took place in Spain in 2022 were in the Basque Country alone, according to data from the Ministry of Labour.

READ ALSO: What are the pros and cons of life in Spain’s Basque Country?

What explains this phenomenon? Is there an underlying explanation? Are the Basque people particularly organised or more radical than other Spaniards?

Part of the explanation for this trend comes from the fact that Basque trade unions have grown, or maintained, at least, as union activity has declined in the rest of the country.

As Spanish trade unions slowly began waning in power and membership over the years (like in many countries around the world) the Basque Country became a hotbed of trade unionism activity and industrial action in Spain from the early-2000s. In more recent years, the 2020s in particular, the proportion of strikes in the Basque Country versus the rest of Spain has grown ever higher due to an overall decrease in the number of strikes around the rest of the country.

Jon Las Heras, Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Basque Country and expert on Basque unions, says that this high rate of strikes compared to the rest of Spain is due, above all, to the trade union model and strategy adopted by the region’s two major unions, Eusko Langileen Alkartasuna (ELA) and Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB).

“ELA and LAB have formed a ‘counter-power’ bloc in opposition to CCOO and UGT [the traditional, major unions in Spain] that are more prone to engage into social dialogue,” Las Heras argues in his paper Striking to Renew: Basque Unions’ Organising Strategies and the Use of the Strike-Fund.

This strategy, he argues, is “based on organising workers ‘deeply’ – especially with ELA’s recurrent use of a strike-fund that fosters membership participation and affiliation through confederal solidarity.”

In short, whereas Spain’s larger national unions are, Las Heras suggests, more inclined to dialogue to resolve industrial disputes, Basque unions prefer more direct action. “This has produced very high strike rates since the 2000s, perhaps the highest in Europe,” he adds.

It is worth considering that the Basque Country, in addition to effectively using strike funds, is also one of the wealthiest parts of Spain. In other words, that workers in the Basque Country take home the second highest salaries in Spain on average, behind only Madrid, could mean that union members are more inclined (or have the financial flexibility) to take strike action than if they were from poorer regions such as Murcia, Extremadura and Andalusia.

READ ALSO: Why are the Basque Country and Catalonia so rich compared to the rest of Spain?

At the very least, being wealthier on average means that Basque workers can afford to stay on strike longer than workers in other parts of the country, something essential when settling disputes through industrial action.

However, trade unionists would no doubt point to their strong trade unionism as one of the reasons they are comparatively well paid, rather than the other way around.

But it wasn’t always like this. According to Las Heras, ELA, LAB and other Basque unions formerly relied on dialogue and sector-wide collective bargaining agreements, as many unions still do, but began to develop “a strategy of political autonomy and trade union action at a level closer to the grassroots” between the 1990s and the 2000s.

This came about partly as a result of changes to the labour market and industrial changes in the Basque Country (which began from the 1980s onwards, notably the types of industry and engineering in the region) as well Basque unions distancing themselves from national unions

“The rise of the second Basque union (LAB) allowed for the two Basque sovereigntist unions to form a new alliance that stood in opposition to the two main Spanish unions,” Las Herras argues.

But it’s also about strategy. Elena Pérez Barredo, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Security in the Basque government, told La Vanguardia that the fundamental reason strikes are so common “lies in the trade union difference that exists in the Basque Country.”

“The ELA has a union strategy and culture that encourages confrontation… a very marked strategy in favour of the strike as an instrument of confrontation,” she adds.

There seem to be several plausible, inter-connected reasons that the Basque Country became Spain’s (and possibly Europe’s) strike capital.

It has strong regional trade unions that exist separately from the larger confederate national unions; these unions have effective strike funds, meaning they can strike for longer; their employees are, on average, likely to be better paid than elsewhere in Spain, meaning they could be more inclined and financially able to take strike action; and finally, Basque unions take a more direct, confrontational approach to industrial disputes, whereas other unions rely more on dialogue and border collective bargaining agreements.

Perhaps Unai Rementeria, a local Basque politician, summed it up best after widespread strike action in the region in 2019. Basque unions, he said simply, “seek permanent confrontation.”

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