Observer archive - In Franco's Spain, 15 July 1959
Twenty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, photographer Michael Peto travelled around Spain with writer Nora Beloff for a three part series in the Observer looking at different aspects of life under General Franco and the future for the country.
One of Spain’s principal attractions to it’s millions of visitors from industrial Northern Europe - besides sunshine and cheap services - is the archaism of the countryside.
You can drive for hundreds of miles and, apart from a patchy and uncertain tarmac under your tyres, there is nothing to remind you of the twentieth century: no poles or pylons, no petrol stations or electric pumps, just the peasants and their children in floppy hats and dateless clothes,
