Like the Spanish, our homes offer some cold comfort

PASSION comes in many forms in modern Spain, an often sultry and intense country where bulls are fought and killed in public and on daytime television and where the flamenco dance, with its often anguished beautiful songs, cannot fail but to touch the human soul.

- Peter Mortimer

This unique flamenco passion comes from the intensity of the singing, the complexity of the guitar work and the dramatic staccato movement of the dancer's feet.

What do we have in England that we could compare to flamenco? Morris dancing? Hmmm.

It is still within living memory that Spain became a democracy, spearheaded in 1975 by the head of state King Juan Carlos, and ending one of Europe's longest dictatorships.

The dictator was General Franco who requested that the German Luftwaffe bomb the small Spanish town of Guernica in 1937, one of the 20th century’s most shameful incidents and immortalised by Pablo Picasso's intensely powerful painting. Intensity seems a word recurring regularly in Spanish history.

Franco was in power in Spain for 36 years, from 1939-1975; not that long distant, though thankfully no Spaniard on our recent trip volunteered his name for discussion and for many of Europe's younger generation he is a figure now barely in their thoughts.