The rain cut loose with drama. Lightning was striking close by and lakes of water fell, almost at once on the narrow street of tables.
When I got here to enjoy my pain au chocolate (what they call here a napoleón de chocolate), fight off the pigeons, and write. I had wanted to sit outside, but all the tables were occupied.
As a result I sat inside, in the darkish and narrow confines that included a row of maybe four or five tables and a counter-display case filled with luscious pastries. If you went further inside this narrow space you found the working bakery and maybe its owner / baker, a dry bread stick of an aging French man.
When it started to rain with the fervor of Evangelicals preaching on a street corner, drenching with sound and wet, suddenly the space overflowed with people. At first confused, I then realized these were the occupants of the tables outside. They carried their plates and cups of coffee and tried to figure out how to accommodate themselves into a much smaller space.
A woman asked if she could take a chair from my table and, as a result, ice was broken. We talked briefly. I found out they were a group of visiting Rumanians, all women. Alicante has had relatively large numbers of Rumanians, though with rising prices in Spain without corresponding increases in income, the numbers have dropped. But these were visitors.
One of them asked the server if there was grocery store open on this holiday morning. She had already been defending herself from customer demands in good Argentine sense—“Wait your turn. There is only me today and I cannot work any faster.” At that break i demands she lifted her thermos of hot water and refilled her gourd of yerba maté before taking a few pulls.
While she drank, almost in unison, I and the similarly aged man sitting next to me in the dark corner, told them almost nothing was open because it was a major holiday.
This led him and me to speak. Turns out, he is from Paris though his family is Andaluz and his new wife is from Alicante. We had a lovely conversation. At one point, he insisted Spain would be much better off it had cultural unity and just a single language. I looked at him, with a slight smile and said “Oh I disagree”. Well we were off, not arguing as you might expect, but dialoguing, two sides in a conversation. And we shall continue that conversation when next we see each other, and we shall, since both he and I live here and frequent that local French bakery.
That passionate encounter took place on Thursday, the Day of Valencia which also celebrates its language, Valencian. Today is a bigger holiday and when I awoke, my patio was wet from substantial rain in the night .
Today is Spain’s National holiday, the Day of Spain, though there is conflict over its name. It has variously been called the Day of Columbus, the Day of HIspanidad (Hispanicity to coin an awkward term in English), and now the National Day.
Spain is a lovely word with an ancient history that goes back at least to the Romans, though it probably predates them and may have origins in the Phoenecians who inhabited Much of Spain’s coastal areas (including Alicante). However, the word did not refer to what we today call Spain, but to the entire Peninsula though, in reality, the Romans who dominated the peninsula long enough to leave their language firmly entrenched—we speak a version of it today—made their word Hispania plural to refer to the peninsula. They called it effectively “The Spains”.
Then Arab and Berber armies came from the same north Africa that had hosted large Phoenecian settlement of relevance to our peninsula, including the amazing city of Carthage. At that point the Roman unity broke and the peninsula became a set of Christian Kingdoms in the fringe of the north and an encyclopedia of Taifas, Moorish “kingdoms” with resultant instabilities.
You can easily see the history of conflict written on the land in the vertiginous number of castles and watch towers throughout the land, many of them still in reasonably good shape.
Once Castile and Aragon, the two most powerful Christian kingdoms, had joined forces in the symbolic and dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabella and conquered the remaining Taifas, including the final one of Cordoba, there was a political union though, as the great historian Benedict Anderson noted, feudal states did not rely on a common language to unify them, but on political fealty which also included kinds of religious celebrations sponsored by kings and lords though the situation was far from one of a single religion, They did create widely shared bureaucratic and educational practices.
Aragon and Castile had different though closely related languages. Numerous others were spoken in Hispania.
With the crown, now of Spain, taking over American lands and even a small part of Asia (the Philippines), Castilian as a formal written language now called Spanish (although not without argument) was born as an instrument of state. It pulled elites toward it, pushing their Iberian and indigenous tongues to become more and more like Castilian though there is still substantial diversity in the Hispanic world within what is glibly called the Spanish language and supported by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Cervantes Institute (meeting in Peru these days).
The Romans were probably wise to make Hispania plural. Even today it is plural, although there are areas of unity if not undisputed and many efforts at creating unity.
On this Day of the Nation, one should not forget that about half of the twentieth century left it fractured as Franco and a Fascist wing including the Church performed a coup and drove out the clearly internationalist left that had won elections yet was fractured among itself. The conflict left a landscape saturated with blood and memories of horror.
Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century are intellectuals and people really grappling with that past and researching it.
On this day in 2025, nonetheless, Spain leads the European Union—of which it is a part giving it a wannabe nation state without full sovereignty. It tops the Community in terms of economic growth and, to a degree, even in political stability.
Even if it does not have linguistic or cultural unity, Spain is worth celebrating for its amazing, if troubled, history and its current, if troubled, success.
