Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett travels through Spain trying to penetrate the wall of silence obscuring the darker sides of its past.
Spaniards are reputed to be amongst Europe's most voluble people. So why have they kept silent about the terrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rule of dictator Generalisimo Francisco Franco?
The appearance -- sixty years after the war ended -- of mass grave containing victims of Franco's death squads has finally broken what Spaniards call 'the pact of forgetting'. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around Spain -- and through Spanish history. Spaniards, he found, had tried to wipe both the Civil War and Franco from their memory. History, Tremlett discovered, was a tinder-box of disagreements for Spaniards. Who caused the civil war? Why do Basque terrorists kill? Why do Catalans hate Madrid? Did the Islamic bombers who killed 190 people in 2004 dream of a return to Spain's Moorish past?
The ghosts of the past were everywhere. Tremlett's journey was also an attempt to make sense of his personal experience of Spaniards: How had women embraced feminism without men noticing? Why do Spaniards go to plastic surgeons, visit brothels or take cocaine more than other Europeans? Finding answers to those questions involved travelling some strange and colourful byroads.
