Allow me, in this missive from Spain, to wander for a while. I have walked the streets of the old port city of Cádiz, marveled at a Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba, and spent countless hours sitting in the plazas of Madrid, and have much to muse upon.

It is twilight in Cádiz, a small city on the southeastern coast of Spain, a place progressively conquered and settled by the Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, and Catholic kings. In the cool of the evening, the Calle San Fernando is filled with people, all walking this long, narrow street. Young and old. Families with strollers. Couples. Groups of teenagers. All out for an evening stroll, a paseo, the practice of taking a walk through town, greeting one’s neighbors, enjoying the cool night air. 

And I am almost convinced that this entire country exists to support this lifestyle, to promote these small acts of community-making. The paseo distorts time, drawing out the hours. I once scoffed at the Spanish way of doing things, this inversion of our social, cultural, and economic order—but now, in the Cádiz twilight, it all seems utterly vital, worth preserving.

We’re in Córdoba, a few hundred miles to the north, touring the city’s Mosque-Cathedral, an embodiment of how this country’s deep history overlaps, how the remnants of various epochs accumulate like so much silt.

As we walk through the Mosque-Cathedral, the building itself begins to shift. Its architecture continues to vary, as each ruler left their influence: a vaulted ceiling—the first of its kind—an extravagant mihrab, and a much more modest section from the caliphate’s decline. 

And then, the Catholic renovations. Following the reconquest of Córdoba by Catholic Spain, the mosque was then consecrated as a cathedral, dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and, over the successive centuries, saw its center gutted, and an elaborate, Renaissance-style sanctuary put in its place.

It’s an odd trick: we’re wandering through the old mosque and suddenly find ourselves inside of a grand cathedral, a Spanish Sistine Chapel.

But let’s step outside of the sanctuary for a moment, to dwell upon a plaque at the back of the mahogany nave, bearing the names of priests murdered in Córdoba during the Spanish Civil War.

Mosque, cathedral, war memorial, a palimpsest.

When I studied in Madrid as an undergraduate, I made a hobby out of looking for relics of the country’s fraught recent past, fascinated by Spain’s relationship with the memory of its Civil War and dictatorship. How could this modern, safe, friendly country have been ruled by a brutal dictator for much of the last century? How have they managed to carry on?

In some regions, this history is more apparent than others: In Barcelona, I found the old bunkers built to weather fascist air raids, the small square in the Gothic Quarter bearing the pockmarks of a bomb that killed dozens of people. Up on Montjuïc, a hill which overlooks the city and the sea, I toured the castle where the defiant Catalán president was executed. 

In Madrid, this history was harder to find. The largest memorial is the Arco de la Victoria, a large arch in the west of the city built by the dictator Francisco Franco to memorialize his bloody victory. There are other remnants, often presented without explanation: the bunkers in Parque del Oeste, where Republican fighters held the line against the fascists for three years, the old eroding trenches in the Casa de Campo, now the refuge of rabbits and sparrows.

I traveled to the city cemetery, and saw the bullet holes in the western wall, where thirteen young women, Las Trece Rosas, were shot. In 2019, heavy rains uncovered a mass grave in the cemetery holding the remains of over 3,000 people. According to one of the cemetery’s caretakers, there are more pits, or fosas, in the cemetery of La Almudena that have yet to be found.

Online maps now show the fosas that have since been identified. Two in Cádiz with the remains of nearly two hundred people, and in Córdoba, in the Cemetery of Nuestra Señora de la Salud, are ten fosas with nearly 900 victims.

When I would ask, Spanish people would express little interest in discussing this chapter of their history. Perhaps because to young people it is ancient history. Perhaps because for their elders it is something they wish to forget.

But what feels settled can all too quickly become undone. 

Fascist Spain is not yet beyond living memory. After the country transitioned to democracy in the Seventies, many of the Franco regime’s leaders were subsequently elected to office, continuing to lead the country.

It was an agreement, of sorts, this “Pact of Forgetting,” that the country would move forward without reprisals or reconciliation over the trauma of the past century—without justice, without remembrance. Exiles were welcomed back. Political prisoners released. And the perpetrators of so much oppression and suffering allowed to walk free.

That memory has sat largely dormant until the last decade and a half. The country’s two ruling factions, the Socialist Party and Partido Popular, have grappled over whether to reckon with the past: whether to map and excavate the mass graves, whether to remove fascist monuments, whether to educate the next generation about the Civil War and dictatorship, whether to exhume Francisco Franco’s body from its prominent place in the Valle de Los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, for many years one of the most visited historic sites in all of Spain.

In 2019, after the Partido Popular lost power, Franco’s body was finally removed from its prominent crypt and taken to a family cemetery north of Madrid, finally out of the public eye. It was hailed as a victory, a turning of the page away from this chapter.

But, at the same time, support for the far right in Spain continues to grow.

In recent years, the share of votes for the ultraconservative party Vox has climbed from ten to fourteen percent, the third largest bloc in the country.

One researcher describes Vox’s platform as “morally authoritarian.” They are hardline ultranationalists. They decry immigration and secularism. Their values are not terribly far from the politics of Francoist Spain.

Two steps forward, one step back.

In this leeward tilt toward fascism I see the same economic alienation as in my own country, magnified by the fact that it happened here already, within living memory.

As I write this in Café Pavón in Madrid I see posters for rent protests in the coming weeks. Rent has skyrocketed by eighty percent in Spain in the last decade. Half of all tenants in the country pay at least forty percent of their income for housing costs. A typical salary is about twenty-seven thousand euros a year. In some regions, unemployment can range as high as thirty percent.

In Cádiz, the central neighborhood was plastered with flyers showing an elderly couple, bags in hand, descending a flight of stairs, passing an oblivious pair of tourists on their way up.

Our guide told us that a new law had outlawed the creation of any new short-term rentals, an attempt to staunch the bleeding. Somewhat sheepishly, I told her that we were staying in one, and she asked where.

“Calle Sacramento,” I replied.

She forced a smile. “We’re neighbors, then.”

With dim economic prospects comes instability, alienation, displacement. As digital nomads and tourists and wealthy foreigners arrive and bid up the price of housing and turn yet another flat into an Airbnb, one’s community becomes atomized.

No longer can you sit with your friends in the plaza, overlook the familiar street from your terrace, walk with your family and greet your neighbors in a paseo. The stuff of life inexorably diminished.

As people lose their places, one can imagine further shifts toward a more reactionary politics, alienation and disillusionment with the status quo fueling a fallback to that recent past—a return to that old order that promised meaning and safety at the expense of everything else.

A choice, almost, between an imagined, idyllic past, and a fraught present.

We’re back in the city of Córdoba, a few blocks away from the tourist district, and finding ourselves in a much more modern neighborhood that, instead of cloistered patios and whitewashed walls, is decidedly more ordinary, filled with tall apartment buildings and crammed with parked cars. 

Lining the street are shops—bars, cafés, doctor’s offices, grocery stores—and people going about their days. 

At a café, an older man writes in a notebook, a painter in splattered overalls stops in for his morning breakfast, a woman orders pastries for her family. 

A city, a country, and a culture are living things, made up of old, conglomerated chunks of history, their sometimes jagged, overlapping edges that cause conflict, but must fundamentally serve the living, or else exist in service of a necropolis, a city of the dead.

And I wonder if memory is more than mere words or monuments but what shapes communal life, those habits and phrases and markers that serve as both safeguard and guide, linking us to the past, toward that which would bring us closer together.

We must honor it, but we cannot be beholden to it. The city not a tomb but a garden. And we the living dwelling in its shadow.

And I will be back to haunt these streets, drifting through the eternal present.