The History of Sex: Seville -- How America 'Gave' Spain a Middle Class -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 12)

However, vowing to fight them on the beaches was like trying to hold back the tide.

The US had done a Cold War deal with the devil in 1953, supporting Franco as a bulwark against Communism and effectively giving its blessing to Viva España sunseekers who then did their bit to prop up the Fascist regime.

The Spanish government didn't like their foreign immorality, but it needed their cash.

When the girls at a school for foreigners in Santander demanded to be able to swim without being fined, the authorities marked off a special section of a nearby beach where they could frolic in their navel-revealing, two-piece, Satanic Bikinis.

SEX- (AND DEATH-) OBSESSED

Naturally, all this mortification of the flesh had the opposite effect, creating a people who were positively—even morbidly—sex-obsessed.

The American novelist Richard Wright opted for a road trip through Spain in 1954, and his little-known travelogue, Pagan Spain, is intriguing mainly because of its time-capsule details and the people he encountered, such as the veteran Spanish journalist who told him 'the real and simple truth' about the civil war:

'We butchered one another and we loved it. The Spanish never had a better time of it in their modern history than they had in that war.'

Or the New Yorker designing the new air bases under the Franco pact:

'What these people need is a middle class. We're going to give them one. These people cannot resist the new stuff that we are bringing in. They try to, but they can't.'

Sexually, though, Spain was still a world apart.

A professional woman who had lived everywhere from Berlin to Buenos Aires said she was shocked by the Spanish obsession with sex.

'When I first came here, I thought that the Spanish had just discovered sex. A Spanish child of six could tell a man of twenty-one in New York things that he does not know.'

Even so, an 'intellectual Spaniard' told Wright that he and his fiancée spoke French in small towns to avoid being fined if he touched her arm in the street:

'Go in the spring and summer into Andalusia and look into the open fields and you'll see the Spaniards fornicating like animals—and the Church has made it like that'.