FROM TUESDAY 7/7 ON SUNDAY 6/9
THE SHIP. University, 2
Franco's autarky ended in the fifties when the United States realized that it was convenient to have an anti-communist bastion in southern Europe in the middle of the Cold War. Spain had not come out of misery after the bloody Civil War and the regime, isolationist and closed, he dreamed of the entry of foreign currency to start getting out of the mud. Tourism was the toll to pay and entailed many contradictions that clashed with Catholic morality. To the visionary mayor of Benidorm, Pedro Zaragoza, he didn't care: it was clear that tourists were necessary. He drove his Vespa to Madrid, he 1953, with the sole aim of obtaining permission so that foreign women could wear bikinis on their beaches. We take care of Spanish souls, but let's be more permissive with foreign women! The regime gave in and would end up using the imaginary of sun and beach to project itself abroad as a modern country, open, friendly and depoliticized, despite maintaining strong control mechanisms over the Spanish ones. Through archival photographs, ordinances of decorum, press and propaganda (“Spain is different”), Under the regime's sun tells a story that swings between fascination and scandal in Franco's Spain. AU
