Environmental Change and Protest in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975

Abstract

This article describes the ways in which Spanish conservationists and environmentalists shaped and challenged state policies during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Over the course of the mid-twentieth century, the Franco regime radically transformed the country’s physical and demographic landscapes while limiting opportunities for dissent. Nonetheless, beginning shortly after the Civil War, a small number of highly placed nature enthusiasts and scientists worked within official channels to protect discrete spaces and species. In the process, they legitimized environmental language and ideas that were later adopted by more politicized activists. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, while working-class groups protested the disproportionate impacts of development on their own neighborhoods, left-wing cultural elites embraced similar complaints to overtly link environmental health with the regime’s injustices. This created a progressive discourse, still discernible in contemporary protest politics, in which environmental and social issues were inextricably connected.

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