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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?

Published: 9 October 2019 09:00 CEST
Updated: 12 October 2023 11:53 CEST
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 does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

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