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SPANISH HISTORY

Spain marks 50 years since deadly bombing that shook Franco regime

Spain will on Wednesday mark 50 years since dictator Francisco Franco's heir apparent, prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco, was killed in a car bomb attack in the worst blow suffered by the regime.

Published: 19 December 2023 12:08 CET

Spain marks 50 years since deadly bombing that shook Franco regime. Photo: EUROPA PRESS / AFP

The 69-year-old admiral, his bodyguard and a driver died on December 20th, 1973 after Basque separatist group ETA detonated a bomb in a tunnel dug under the street in Madrid’s upscale Salamanca neighbourhood as his car passed.

The massive explosion opened a huge crater and sent the vehicle hurtling over 20 metres (65 feet) into the air before landing in the patio of a convent.

The first police officers who arrived at the scene thought it had been a gas explosion, not an assassination, since they did not immediately see the prime minister’s vehicle.

Carrero Blanco, a longtime advisor to Franco who had been prime minister for just six months, had just left Mass and was on his way to his office when he was killed.

It was the first time that a government minister had been killed in such violent circumstances since Franco came to power after the end of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War, and it revealed the vulnerability of his regime, which
responded to the assassination by stepping up its repression.

A frail-looking Franco was seen weeping in public for the first time at Carrero Blanco’s funeral. He died less than two years later, paving the way for Spain’s transition to democracy.

Head of Spanish State, General Franco poses among the members of the Kingdom Council, 09 June 1973, after having appointed Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (left, beside Franco) as Prime Minister. Photo: STAFF / EUROPAPRESS / AFP

The dictator was “never the same, he got into a physical and psychological slump”, Spain’s foreign minister at the time, Laureano López Rodó, said in a Spanish public television documentary about Carrero Blanco’s assassination.

The impact of Carrero Blanco’s death on Spanish history is still hotly debated in several books published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his assassination.

Carrero Blanco had served as deputy prime minister for five years before he was appointed premier in June 1973, and had played a key role in stifling opposition and propping up Franco’s hard-line regime.

Some historians believe his assassination eliminated the possibility the dictatorship could continue after Franco’s death with him at the helm, while others argue opposition to the dictatorship was already on the rise and the restoration of democracy was inevitable even if he had not been killed.

The meticulously planned assassination also catapulted ETA to the international limelight. Founded in 1959 at the height of Franco’s dictatorship, which repressed Basque culture and language, ETA is accused of
killing more than 850 people in its fight for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwest France.

The group announced a permanent ceasefire in 2011 and formally disbanded in 2018.

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Are Spaniards the world's most misunderstood sleepers?

Along with their supposed obsession with bullfighting and constant sipping on sangría, one of the timeless (yet misunderstood) stereotypes that foreigners have of Spaniards is that they have a siesta every day.

In reality, this is far from the truth. Often foreigners can mistake the laid back pace of life in Spain, combined with the easy going nature of many Spaniards and tradition of siestas (more on the history below) as evidence that Spaniards must sleep a lot.

In more reductionist terms, this leads to Spaniards sometimes being incorrectly characterised as lazy or work shy — any culture that has a tradition of taking a nap during the day must sleep more, right?

This is one of those cultural stereotypes that just feels right, even though the reality is quite different.

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Not only do Spaniards work more on average than many of their European neighbours, according to OECD figures, but new data has revealed that they actually sleep less than many others around the continent. Less, even, than many of their supposedly harder working Northern European neighbours.

According to statistics from the Sleep Cycle app, Spaniards sleep on average 7 hours and 13 minutes per day (or night).

For context, that makes Spain one of the countries with the lowest average sleep hours on the continent. Europe’s deepest sleepers are found in Holland and Finland (7 hours 37 minutes) followed by countries like the UK (7.33), Ireland (7.30) and France (7.29).

At the other end of the sleep spectrum, among the continent’s lightest sleepers (or those that sleep the least) are Italy (7.09), Russia (7.07), Poland (7.04) and Turkey, where Turks sleep an average of just 6.5 hours per night.

The reality

So, we know that Spaniards sleep less on average than many other nationalities. But what about siestas specifically?

Although many children and the elderly may choose to take a nap, most working people in Spain don’t have time to take a snooze during the working day.

According to survey data from 2016, 58 percent of Spaniards never take a siesta, while just 18 percent say they do so at least four days a week. Another 16 percent said they have one between one and three days a week, and 8 percent even less frequently than that.

In fact, data aside, anecdotally speaking many Spaniards claim they don’t sleep enough (siesta or no siesta) and they’d probably admit they should get more shut eye. The long-held siesta stereotype about Spain comes, in part, from history, climate and cliché, but also the structure of the Spanish working and social day.

"There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day."

– Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/9qQ33i4lQj

— Nick O'Brien (@NickLovesSpain) April 20, 2023

“Most workers have a split shift, and that ends up delaying our whole day. We Spaniards tend to have dinner after nine o’clock at night, and this means that we go to bed without having fully digested our food,” says Adela Fraile, sleep specialist at the HM Puerta del Sur University Hospital in Madrid.

This late eating custom, which usually means eating lunch between 2-4pm and then dinner anywhere from 9-11pm, is often the first thing many foreigners notice about Spain. But it’s not just that. As food is such an integral part of Spanish culture, other parts of life fit around lunch and dinner, rather than the other way around.

One example of this is the lateness of Spain’s prime time TV slot.

“We are also used to watching TV after dinner, and as prime time programmes start late, we often end up staying up until they finish,” Fraile adds. “Using devices such as computers, tablets or consoles in bed doesn’t help either… the German and the Spaniard get up at the same time, but the Spaniard has gone to bed later,” she concludes.

Nazi time zones

There’s also another slightly darker, historical explanation for the unconventional timekeeping and body clocks of Spaniards: the Nazis.

Although officially neutral during the Second World War, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who was keen to show his thanks for Nazi support during the Spanish Civil War, demonstrated this to Hitler by agreeing to put Spain’s clocks forward by an hour in an act of solidarity with Nazi Germany.

Spain has remained in the Central European Time zone ever since, in line with countries as far east as Poland. That means that Madrid currently has the same time as Warsaw in Poland 2,290km away but is one hour ahead of Lisbon which is only 502 km away.

This bizarre historical quirk has had a lasting impact on Spanish culture and society that underpins everything from Spaniard’s sleep cycles and meal times to the country’s birth rates and economic growth.

In recent years there have been calls to make the switch back to GMT because many believe the time zone quirk is affecting Spaniard’s productivity and quality of life. In 2013 a Spanish national commission concluded that Spaniards sleep significantly less than the European average, and that this led to increased stress, concentration problems, both at school and work, and workplace accidents.

The history of siestas

So, where does the siesta fit into all this?

After the Spanish Civil War, it was common for people to work two jobs to support their families: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Taking a longer two-hour break allowed them to rest before starting their next job, and often this (understandably) included a nap.

Siestas were also used as a way to avoid midday heat, especially among agricultural workers. Spain is not alone in this tradition: workers in other countries close to the equator, such as Greece, Mexico, Ecuador, the Philippines, Costa Rica and Nigeria, observe similar sleep schedules.

These working hours, roughly 8/9am-2pm and 4pm-8pm, have endured in Spanish work culture until today, despite the fact that most Spaniards don’t work outside, have two jobs or take siestas for that matter.

When American in Spain Melissa Perri posed the question to Spaniards only “When do you sleep? Are you vampires?” one Spaniard replied “We have a culture built around the siesta and no time to take siestas any more, so people are getting less sleep than they need”.

Serious question for people from Spain…

When do you SLEEP?

Been here for a week. Dinner at 10pm (sometimes ELEVEN) and at work by 9am. Weekends people in their 40s and 50s out until 3am.

Are you vampires? How do you do it? What’s the secret?

— Melissa Perri (@lissijean) May 31, 2023

The future of siestas

So, what of siestas in the future? As the data shows, Spaniards sleep less than most other countries, and very few Spaniards actually take a siesta during the working week. In that sense, siestas could continue their downward trajectory and slowly die out over time.

Recent proposals by the Spanish government to cut the working week, which would likely mean that many Spaniards have a shorter lunch break and finish work earlier, say around 5pm or 6pm, would probably accentuate this trend and remove the need for afternoon naps for many people.

However, there’s also some evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic caused a slight resurgence in siesta sleeping among Spaniards. The rise of remote working (known as teletrabajo in Spanish) led many to reassess their sleeping habits, and as time goes on and the working world becomes increasingly digitised and online, perhaps Spaniards will begin splitting up the day again when working from home.

One thing seems certain, however. Siestas, like bullfighting and sangría and screaming olé for no good reason, will probably live on as a Spanish stereotype for a long while yet.

Now, time for a lie down.

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