Spain: Toward a Change

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part of his strategy to leave the succession question in the air. In public, the Pretender is patiently stoic, pretends that no succession problem exists. Newsmen always like to see the situation as a football match, he comments cheerily to visitors. The whole matter, he adds, has been "exaggerated." But he speaks more freely in private. When aides keep assuring him that all important factions in Spain are for him. he will mutter: "If everybody's so monarchist, then why the hell am I in Estoril?" New Middle Class. Whoever runs Spain next will inherit a country slowly, painfully outgrowing the isolation and poverty of centuries. In old Castile, land of santos y cantos (saints and songs), village steeples are inhabited by storks, the near-sacred birds of Spain, standing high in their twig nests and fanning their young with great wings. The gypsies were on the road last week, trekking north for the summer. In hot. sunny squares, cavernous cathedrals waited, filled with cool air and the dusty odor of saintly bones in silver boxes.

But the fact or at least the promise of change is everywhere. Leaping the Pyrenees at last, Spain has applied for associate membership in Europe's Common Market in order to share in the Continent's booming trade. Madrid, its population doubled in 20 years, wears the pink of great new brick apartment houses stretching far to the north and south. Its streets, once asphalt museums for antiquated jalopies, are now clogged with gleaming SEATs, the Spanish-made version of the Italian Fiat. The cars are still largely for the rich; a better index to the general improvement is the horde of buzzing motor scooters steered dauntlessly through the city streets by clerks, factory foremen, salesmen, shopkeepers — the nucleus of the new middle class slowly taking shape in Spain.

Change is not limited to the cities. In the hungriest part of Spain, the forsaken valley of Las Hurdes. a few thousand peo ple for generations had no contact with the outside; their inbreeding was said to produce malformed children, and to all Spaniards, Las Hurdes became a synonym for decadence. In the region today, riggers are laying a power line across the valley, a hospital is being built, fruit trees grow in the irrigated fields near a power dam.

The children are ragged and dirty—but healthy enough.

New Riviera. Franco's regime is rightly proud of its sprawling Plan Badajoz. the 40-mile-long irrigation project along the Guadiana River near the Portuguese border; here a onetime malarial swamp has been turned into fertile fields that make Spain all but self-sufficient in cotton and rice.

Tourism is one of Spain's biggest assets.

It has been a cold, damp spring in Spain, but this has not deterred the first wave of the estimated 10 million foreigners—one for every three Spaniards—who will visit Spain this year, particularly the booming Costa Brava and Costa del Sol. which have turned into a kind of noisy, cut-rate Riviera, where conservative Spaniards sneer that the girls go to Mass in bikinis.

Things are not quite that bad, but Torremolinos has become a real estate promoter's dream, with clusters of cottages selling for $5,000 to $10,000 apiece; billboards in the area advertise Motello Rancho, Serv-Inn, Miami in Europa. The tourists will leave some $700 million worth of hard currency in