ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the initiatives by local historians, law experts, architects, and intellectuals to highlight the territorial diversity of Spanish history. This task was first developed by traditionalist and Catholic historians, who often cooperated with surviving intellectuals identified with substate nationalisms before 1936. Provincial institutes of “History and Culture” subsequently took the lead. While the only party permitted (Falange) tried to lead their activities, from the 1950s onwards local scholars and historians increasingly detached themselves from the tutelage of the Falange, while in some areas (such as Navarre or Biscay and also Asturias and Valencia), Carlist–traditionalist intellectuals went their own way. The vindication of the common-law codes of several regions was championed by traditionalists as a new banner for tolerated opposition towards the regime’s attempts at definitively unifying civil law. Moreover, the different views of Spain’s diversity of landscapes, which were also endorsed by the regime’s tourism propaganda, contributed to the enshrining of regional stereotypes in the cultural repertoire of Spanish banal nationalism. The tension between tradition and modernity, as well as between Catholic ruralism and new attempts at shaping a Spanish “style” of urban planning, was expressed in the activities of the reconstruction programme for devastated regions.
