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Spaniards leading a national surge in global business and politics, culture and the arts. As the country prepares for a pivotal election, TIME examines its striking creative burst
In sport there is the same confidence and élan. Who’s the youngest person to have won a Formula One Grand Prix? Spain’s Fernando Alonso, last year in Hungary, aged 22. Who clinched Spain’s Davis Cup tie against the Czech Republic in Brno last month? Precocious Rafael Nadal, 17. Who was football’s most expensive transfer this year? José Antonio Reyes, for whose goal-scoring prowess English club Arsenal paid about €25 million. With his own signings, who has turned Real Madrid into one of soccer’s biggest global brand names? Businessman president Florentino Pérez. Who has stood atop the world’s 8,000-m-plus mountains more times than anyone else? Basque Juanito Oiarzabal. At sea level, America’s Cup-holder Switzerland, for lack of coast, has chosen Valencia as the venue for the 2007 challenge. Whom do the New Zealanders, desperate to regain the trophy, pick to design their boat? Spaniard Marcelino Botín.
Most fields boast similar standouts. Architect Santiago Calatrava has designed a spectacular new transit station to run below ground zero in New York City. Writer Antonio Muñoz Molina—who happened to be there on Sept. 11—has just released a book, Windows of Manhattan, which describes the city Calatrava is helping to restore. In film, female directors and screenwriters like Icíar Bollaín are hard on the heels of Pedro Almodóvar, having scooped the pool in the recent Goya awards, Spain’s Oscars. Tamara Rojo, who dances with London’s Royal Ballet, is considered one of the world’s best, aged only 29. Singer Alejandro Sanz last month won a Grammy for his new CD, No es lo Mismo (It’s Not the Same).
A nation that only a few decades ago was oppressed now has the nerve to help scupper the E.U. constitution and send troops to Iraq
What’s driving Spain’s creative outpour? “Pain and pleasure,” says Javier Bardem, one of Spain’s leading actors best known outside the country for his roles in Before Night Falls and The Dancer Upstairs. “We are a Catholic country with a very strong sense of guilt. The way to fight off that guilt is to get as much pleasure as we can.” In a world where war and terrorism rule the headlines, a little hedonism goes a long way. “Sometimes when I talk to people I can tell they expect me to be like a bullfighter or a seducer, full of passion,” Bardem says. “It’s true we don’t have that same sense of shame about sex or desire that other cultures do, but it’s just fun, not something we take seriously.”
The same zeal (if not success) shows up in other areas of Spanish endeavor. The nation lags in many areas of science and technology, but cases abound of individual projects exhibiting Iberian inventiveness and enthusiasm. Here are just two examples, one almost out of this world, one almost completely nuts. Juan Pérez Mercader, director of the year-old Center of Astrobiology in Madrid, admits, “Once I start talking about Mars, it’s hard to stop me.” What particularly excites Pérez is a joint project between his center and NASA to help discover if there is or has been some form of life on that planet. Not by going there, but by digging in Andalucía. The project is at the former mining town of Minas de Riotinto, in Huelva province, where the terrain, rich in iron and minerals, appears to be akin to that of Mars. “We have now drilled holes to more than 200 m,” says Pérez, “and are examining cores to see if in this extreme environment there are forms of life adapted to the high iron content, which is what makes Mars red. Before the end of 2006 we hope to develop the technology to enable similar robotic drilling on Mars.”
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