The Provinces of Spain

There are fifty provinces, including the three outside the peninsula, divided into hundreds of smaller districts. In turn, the districts are divided into 9,255 individual communities, some with tradition and autonomy running back into prehistory. These are usually marked out by the courses of streams, the broken incline of hills, mountain valleys and other incidents of landscape. Together they make a mosaic into which families and larger groups of people fit. These have come down to modern times with marked individual char acter, the inhabitants of each community greatly resembling each other in thought and dress and custom. Across the thousands of years each newcomer to the community has been worn into its tra ditional mold, adding only a unit to a common local point of view. These people are unmoved by the passage of time; they have rejected new ideas one by one as they have appeared. They till the fields in time of peace and take to the hills as guerrilleros in time of trouble.

Each of these communities is separated from its neighbors and substantially lives on its own resources. Each, like the people that con stitute it, is self-reliant and conservative, having somehow learned to live on the stubborn earth. Perhaps this remarkable achievement is the source of the inordinate pride of the individual community. The communication of thought within the province is fragmented and distorted by the individuality of each community, and the polit ical life of the province is only the sum of community politics.

The modern regions of Spain derive their basic personality from the ancient kingdoms with which their present boundaries are more or less identical. These kingdoms grew up separately because they occupied areas cut off from each other by the hard profile of the land.

Even the two regions most advanced politically, Castile and Aragon, lived side by side for eight hundred years with only the most super ficial association one with the other. So different were their interests in the eleventh century that one was engaged with the Moors five hundred miles to the southwest while the other, after conquering Sicily, was pursuing the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor.

The tradition of regional interests has been so strong in Spain that even after full political union under the Castilian monarchs, Vigo was more preoccupied with its trade in the Caribbean than with Madrid, and the Basque sailors knew foreign seaports better than they knew those of Andalusia. Spain seldom presents a Spanish face to the world. Usually it has presented a Galician or an Andalusian face to the Americas, a Catalonian face to France, and a Valencian face to the Mediterranean.