In the three decades following the Second World War, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco's Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe's prosperous democracies.
This book chronicles how their presence not only helped to strengthen the Franco regime's economic and political standing, but also contributed to undermining the dictatorship's moral austerity and economic autarky. This study looks beneath exotic imagery of bulls and flamenco dancers, and sensationalized stories of Francoist police persecuting bikini-clad foreigners, to examine how the advent of foreign tourism profoundly influenced the regime's diplomatic and economic policies as early as 1945. In the 1960s, mass tourism provoked important shifts in the national political dynamic, contributing significantly to the conditions in which Spain's post-Franco democracy was born.