‘Facing the Sun’: Nature and Nation in Franco's ‘New Spain’ (1936–51)

This article examines the relation between nation and nature in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and post-war years. As in other European cases of fascist and parafascist regimes, the Francoist regime mobilised nature for political and nationalistic goals. Spanish nature embodied the essences of the ‘true Spain’ and was seen as key to the regeneration of the country. The regime assumed an agrarian discourse that identified the countryside and nature with the real essences of the nation. It adopted autarkic political, social and economic directives, closing the country upon itself in order to regenerate and purge away its sins, but also confident that the nation's nature was the basis for building a new empire.