Why Spain might be the worst country in western Europe

Spain is busy with an image update. Thanks to a host of savvy media stories, we’re now supposed to think of Spain not just in terms of package holidays, sangria, and Catholicism but also as chic, romantic, stylishly left-wing — the macho anti-fascism of Hemingway’s Spain updated for the #MeToo age — and devastatingly cutesy.

Take the recent viral trend among Spain’s youth: a supermarket pineapple gimmick that’s gone global. A TikTok video has Gen Z storming the Mercadona chain between 7 and 8 p.m., under the notion that placing an upside-down pineapple in their shopping trolley signals romantic availability. “Spanish singles found a new dating strategy. It’s in the fruit aisle,” crooned the Washington Post. How utterly adorable.

Well, I’m not buying it. Of my medium-number of brushes with Spain, none have been great — and certainly not cutesy — most were downright dreadful. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that Spain is the worst country, admittedly not in the world, but certainly in western Europe.

The cities are dire — some of the least appealing on the continent, and not just Magaluf, Marbella, or Alicante. The classy ones are also weird and sad — the much-lauded Ronda depresses me, recalling the end of the world with its perilous chasm; my trips to Seville, Granada and Córdoba as a kid were marred by the stink of drains in every room we slept in. The baked, dull avenues of Madrid, the endless and fruitless quest for the best place for cured meat, the corporate flourishes. Barcelona, twice intended by me as a romantic break, is a bewildering tundra of tat and dive bars, dotted with the ugliest architecture on earth — that of Gaudi. It’s got a bang average beach, bang average buildings and overpriced food. Now it’s an anti-tourism war zone and you’ll get pickpocketed as a bonus.

Politically, Spain is nasty. It’s got a loony left and right with far too much power. I’d give special mention to its knee-jerk hatred of Israel. Right after October 7, when there was an EU motion to halt aid to Palestinian territories as it was demonstrably funneled to Hamas, Spain and Ireland refused. In December, a Spanish politician raised a stuffed dead baby in a shroud in parliament to represent Israeli bloodlust in Gaza. It was ghoulish.

Meanwhile, the country’s rambunctious anti-tourism and anti-Airbnb demonstrations have provided a titillating vision for the anti-profit crowd across the West. “Down with tourists, down with gentrification, down with rents, and down with growth, wealth, and money!” they chant. This is Spanish protest culture bravely “fighting back” — as the BBC puts it — against the influx of vulgar people who dare to spend their money in Spain’s roasting cities. “Your luxury, our misery!” they declare. Isn’t it the other way round?

Then there is the economy, which is all but moribund, with seismic, Europe-leading joblessness. Spanish history is also horrid if one begins with the Inquisition, the bloodiest, most sadistic, most pathological manifestation of Catholic dogma in Europe, and moves through to Franco and the long love affair with fascism.

I can’t think of anywhere in Europe — even eastern Europe or the Balkans — where the food is so bad and yet so hyped. Am I really to travel a thousand miles for poisonous mounds of oily carbs, those childish vats of paella, the greasy tapas that hide their unwholesomeness in the romance of the little beakers of wine and the buzzing terraces, the ungodly mounds of cured pig, and my ongoing gastronomical nightmare: fried calamari in butter-soaked baguette?

And what of a great Spanish literature — is there one? I mean other than Cervantes? If there is, and probably there is, it’s never appealed to this devourer of Mann, Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo, Gissing, and Dickens. Even Hemingway’s Spanish novels, while good, are oddly two-dimensional and brutish.

Bringing it all together is the bullfighting; slowly and cruelly torturing animals for sport in view of tens of thousands of baying onlookers. This is not a tradition fit for the modern era, let alone western Europe. So no, you can take your tapas and your pineapple dating and your progressive rage — I won’t be troubling Spain with my tourism any time soon.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.