From the proclamation of Juan Carlos I and the Transition through the Constitution of 1978, the 23-F coup attempt and the long PSOE years, accession to Europe and the Barcelona Olympics, the introduction of the euro and the Madrid train bombings, the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the 15-M movement, the abdication of Juan Carlos and the Catalan crisis of 2017, to the exhumation of Franco and the Spain of fifty years of democracy. Slide across the half-century in which a Bourbon monarchy and an ancient state remade themselves as a young European democracy.
On 22 November, two days after Franco's death, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón is proclaimed king before the Cortes. His opening address — 'I want to be the king of all Spaniards' — signals an opening the regime's last defenders had not foreseen.
From the proclamation of Juan Carlos I and the Transition through the Constitution of 1978, the 23-F coup attempt and the long PSOE years, accession to Europe and the Barcelona Olympics, the introduction of the euro and the Madrid train bombings, the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the 15-M movement, the abdication of Juan Carlos and the Catalan crisis of 2017, to the exhumation of Franco and the Spain of fifty years of democracy. Slide across the half-century in which a Bourbon monarchy and an ancient state remade themselves as a young European democracy.
On 22 November, two days after Franco's death, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón is proclaimed king before the Cortes. His opening address — 'I want to be the king of all Spaniards' — signals an opening the regime's last defenders had not foreseen.
On 15 June, Spaniards vote in their first free general election in forty-one years. Adolfo Suárez's centrist UCD wins; Felipe González's PSOE comes second; Santiago Carrillo's recently legalised Communists take third place. The political system of the Transition is set.
On 6 December, by referendum, 87.8 per cent of voting Spaniards approve the new Constitution. Spain becomes a parliamentary monarchy in a 'social and democratic state of law', with seventeen autonomous communities to come — the deepest decentralisation of any large European country.
At 18.23 on 23 February, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero of the Civil Guard storms into the Cortes with two hundred men and holds the entire Spanish political class at gunpoint. For seventeen hours the fate of Spanish democracy hangs in the balance. King Juan Carlos, in a televised address at one in the morning, orders the army back to barracks.
On 28 October the Socialists win 202 of 350 seats — the largest parliamentary majority in Spanish history. Felipe González, forty years old, takes office on 2 December as the first left-wing prime minister since Negrín in 1939. The 'change' he promised will run for fourteen years.
On 1 January, after nine years of negotiation, Spain and Portugal enter the European Economic Community. Three months later, the country narrowly votes to remain in NATO. Spain — Atlanticist, European, secular, modern — finds at last the international position the Transition had promised.
On 25 July the archer Antonio Rebollo, in his wheelchair, lights the Olympic flame in the stadium of Montjuïc with a flaming arrow. In Seville, the Universal Exposition marking the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus draws forty-two million visitors. The high-speed AVE Madrid–Seville opens in April. Spain announces itself to the world.
On 1 January the new euro coins and notes replace the peseta. For the first time since the Catholic Monarchs unified the currency in the fifteenth century, Spain shares a coinage with the rest of the continent.
On the morning of 11 March, ten bombs explode on four commuter trains entering Atocha station. One hundred and ninety-three people are killed and over two thousand wounded. Three days before the general election, the government's insistence that ETA is responsible — when al-Qaeda's role is becoming clear — turns the vote.
On 30 June, Spain becomes the third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage with full adoption rights. Two years later the Law of Historical Memory, the first official recognition of Franco's victims, follows in October 2007.
On 15 May, a week before the municipal elections, tens of thousands of indignados — 'the outraged' — occupy the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and the central squares of forty other cities. Unemployment is at 21 per cent, youth unemployment at 45 per cent; banks are being bailed out, families evicted by them in their thousands.
On 2 June, the seventy-six-year-old king Juan Carlos announces his abdication after thirty-nine years on the throne. His son, the forty-six-year-old Felipe VI, is proclaimed king on 19 June at a sober ceremony in the Cortes, with the queen Letizia at his side and the small Princess Leonor — heir presumptive — beside them both.
On 1 October, despite the Constitutional Court's prohibition, the Catalan government holds a unilateral referendum on independence. Spanish police charge polling stations across Catalonia, leaving nine hundred injured. On 27 October the Catalan parliament declares independence; the same day Madrid suspends Catalan autonomy and dissolves the parliament.
On 24 October, after years of legal battles with Franco's family, the body of the dictator is exhumed from the basilica of the Valle de los Caídos and reburied in the family vault at El Pardo cemetery. The basilica, built by Republican forced labour to glorify the regime, ceases to be a state shrine.
Half a century after Franco's death, Spain is the world's fifteenth-largest economy, a NATO and EU founding-member state, the most popular tourist destination on earth at ninety-four million visitors a year. Its political life is fragmented, its territorial settlement contested, its history still alive — and its democratic Constitution, against the odds the Transition faced, intact.