'Franco did it': Five quirky ways the dictator shaped modern Spain

With the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death this year, there has unsurprisingly been quite a bit of talk about the dictator’s legacy and his impact on Spain.

Much of it, of course, is critical. However, some Spaniards, especially younger males, view the dictatorship with increasingly rose-tinted glasses and give examples of the supposed positives Franco did for the country.

Often these are untrue, such as the widely-shared claim that Franco created the Spanish social security system, that he made Sunday a rest day for workers or that he set up the country's pension system.

READ ALSO: Franco dictatorship splits Spain 50 years after death

However, despite that, to say that the man who ruled Spain for decades didn’t have a huge impact on the country would also be absurd.

Despite the fact there’s a tendency among some foreigners - including foreign correspondents and historians - to see Franco in absolutely everything, it’s fair to say that in some specific ways, the dictator’s legacy does live on to this day.

Everything happens later in the day because of Franco

Spain is in the wrong time zone. The country is geographically in line with the UK and Portugal. It makes sense, then, that Spain was in the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) zone until around 75 years ago.

But that changed during the Second World War. With the country ravaged by its own recent Civil War - in which Franco’s victory was heavily supported by Hitler - Franco felt obliged to make a gesture of some sort. Although ultimately remaining neutral in the war, he decided to show his support for Hitler by agreeing to put Spain’s clocks forward by an hour in an act of solidarity with Nazi Germany.

Spain has remained in the Central European Time zone ever since, in line with countries as far east as Poland. But Franco’s decision all those years ago isn’t just a quirk of Spanish history, or testament to the extent to which the legacy of that period still looms over Spanish society. It was also a decision that has had a lasting impact on Spanish culture and society that underpins everything from Spaniards' sleep cycles and meal times to the country’s birth rates and economic growth.

There have been calls to make the switch back to GMT because many believe the time zone quirk is affecting Spaniard’s productivity and quality of life. In 2013, a Spanish national commission concluded that Spaniards sleep almost an hour less than the European average, and that this led to increased stress, concentration problems, both at school and work, and workplace accidents.

READ ALSO: Why Spain is still in the wrong time zone because of Hitler

Franco introduced Spain's divisive mass tourism model

Spain received 94 million tourists in 2024 and even its long-held status as de facto holiday destination for much of northern Europe can be traced back to Franco.

After decades of international isolation following the Civil War, cash-strapped Francoist Spain completely changed its strategy in the late 50s and early 60s. The dictatorship liberalised the economy and invested heavily in promoting tourism abroad as a means of whitewashing the regime, turning its back on the Catholic, traditionalist sector of society which shunned the idea of free-thinking northern European tourists gracing Spain’s beaches in bikinis.

The regime opened its borders without checks or visa requirements, the peseta was deliberately devalued to make it cheaper for foreigners to spend their holidays in Spain, and legislation fixed the price hotels and restaurants could charge in order to keep them low, all factors that planted the seeds for the ‘anything goes’ tourism model.

In fact, two of the popular tourism slogans of the time were Pase sin llamar (‘Come in without knocking’) and ‘Spain is different’, written in English.

From 1960 to 1970, the number of international tourists quadrupled from 6.1 million to 24.1 million. It was during this time that Spain’s coastal building bonanza kicked off and, decades later, the Spanish costas are still the first choice destination of tourists across the continent.

READ ALSO: Why Spain is a cheap mass tourism destination

Franco is largely responsible for 'Empty Spain'

Franco is also arguably responsible for the mass migration of Spaniards from rural Spain into big cities, setting the foundations for Empty Spain and the depopulation problems it has caused in more recent years.

From the late-1950s, millions in Spain left their pueblos to live in cities in search of work.The transfer of rural populations to industrial centres such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Madrid led to major regional imbalances, many of which live on today.

When we think of the concept of 'Empty Spain', we think of more recent migrant flows and younger Spaniards forced to provincial capitals in search of work, but according to data from INE, in the 1960s alone more than three million Spaniards left the countryside for the city.

The economic boom Franco hoped for required a large workforce, which came from rural areas. To compound the trend, agricultural production was mechanised around this time which meant that there was also a surplus of labour in the countryside, forcing more people into the cities in search of work.

Spaniards' obsession with home ownership started under Franco

This migration from the Spanish countryside also had another effect: it made Spain into a nation of homeowners. Spain has historically had among the highest property ownership rates in Europe.

The Spain of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was a country of tenants. Until the 1960s, half of all housing in the country was rented. Incredibly, in 1950 only one in twenty people in Madrid or Barcelona owned their own homes, but by 2007 the Ministry of Housing estimated that 87 percent of Spanish households owned at least one home.

José Luis Arrese, the first Housing Minister in Spanish history, told the Francoist Parliament in the 1950s that “We want a society of owners, not proletarians.” With the great migration ongoing, estimates suggest that around 12 million Spaniards (roughly 40 percent of the population at the time) moved house between 1951 and 1975.

The Franco regime discouraged renting a 1954 limited rent law enabled the construction of millions of subsidised homes. Then the real construction boom broke out: between 1961 and 1975, four million flats were built, often in the classic Spanish apartment block style.

To top it all off, the Banco Hipotecario de España was created to compensate private banks granting mortgages to the working classes flowing into Spanish cities.

Spaniards' poor English is partly attributable to Francoist policies

Something that many foreigners notice in Spain is the relatively low levels of English, especially compared to other European countries. Franco arguably played a hand in this too and it comes down to films. Another quirk (or annoyance, depending on your opinion) of Spain is that the vast majority of films in both cinemas and on TV are dubbed into Spanish.

During the early stages of the Franco dictatorship, it was compulsory for all films to be dubbed into Spanish. The Language Defence Law, introduced in 1941, was used to strengthen Spanish nationalism by promoting Castilian Spanish through a mass cultural mode like cinema.

As such, Spaniards didn't and many to this day don't regularly hear English. In Spain just 4 percent of Spaniards who go to the cinema choose to watch the original version with subtitles. Figures from the Federation of Spanish Cinemas (FECE) from 2015 show how out of the roughly 3,500 large screen cinemas in Spain, barely 200 of them showed international films in their original language.

Compare this with neighbouring Portugal, a country with one of the highest levels of English on the continent, where the post-WWII Portugal of dictator Salazar went the other way and in order to guarantee what was "authentically Portuguese", a 1948 law banned Portuguese cinema from being dubbed.

READ ALSO: Why does Spain dub every foreign film and TV series?