- Sep 20, 2017
- 11,965
- 22,630
- 28,180
After a long transfer, the Vuelta marks its entrance to its home country with a format of which Unipublic are just about the last remaining fans (or at least among organisers). In fact, this is only the second classic-style TTT (and third overall) of the season, and the first one was seven months ago and also in Spain. As it’s stage 5, it should come as no surprise that some teams are more hampered by crashes than others, but given that this is a 26-minute effort at most for the winning team it shouldn’t impact proceedings too much.
As such, this will be the shortest stage if you’re watching everything in full on television. However, if you find yourself with a lot of free time you don’t know what to do with as a result, I have good news: I wanted to lay down the broader strokes of Spanish history in this post and it got out of hand even by my standards. Blame Unipublic for not posting the full route and giving me too much time to write about things that aren’t related to cycling.
Map and profile
Start
It’s been a pretty rough transfer overnight – 20-kilometre trip to the airport, flight into (presumably) Girona, then another 50-kilometre transfer for the riders, and a 500-kilometre drive for the caravan – but at last, the race has arrived in Figueres. The long transfer is definitely a big factor in why there’s a TTT, as it allows for a 5pm start even with Unipublic sensibly avoiding racing in the dark this time round. However, the only reason such a late start is needed is because they planned a pretty random Gran Salida and then decided against having either a third rest day or an additional stage in France to make the trip back to Spain easier on the riders, so they really don’t deserve a pass for this decision given that it benefits precisely nobody other than themselves.
Right, that’s enough criticism of bad logistical planning, let’s talk about where we actually are. Although there was a village where Figueres is now situated in Roman times, the site didn’t develop into a town until the 13th century. As this development had a lot to do with the political situation at the time, this is probably a good time to talk Spanish history. And by talk Spanish history, I mean really talk Spanish history – it’s both less fragmented and less well-known internationally, so I’m going to stray from my usual format and go through the broader strokes of Spanish history on the first Spanish stage. As we’re in Catalonia, it will be from something of a Catalan perspective.
A landmark event in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Between this famous moment and the perhaps even more pivotal defeat at Adrianople to the Goths (who had not yet split into two branches at that point) in 376, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Visigoths were fiercely anti-Roman, however in fact they were quite Romanized and usually happy to ally with Rome, especially against the Huns who had pushed them out of their original lands in the years before Adrianople. Indeed, both Adrianople and the Sack were driven in significant part by Rome badly mismanaging its relationship with the Goths/Visigoths, and even then the Visigothic Sack was fairly mild compared to the one by the Vandals in 455.
This combination of Roman weakness and on-and-off alliance with the crumbling Empire explains the early trajectory of the Visigothic Kingdom. After sacking Rome, they were allowed to settle in what is now southern France. With the exception of a first attempt at invading the Iberian Peninsula at the behest of the Romans in 416 and a few brief campaigns against the Romans, their settlement was stable by the standards of the time for the first decades. After allying with Rome to repel Attila the Hun in 451, the Romans once again invited them to invade Iberia in 456, sparking an era of expansion on both sides of the Pyrenees that lasted until after the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. From this point on, Catalonia was almost uninterruptedly part of the Visigothic Kingdom for well over two centuries.
The Visigoths were pushed mostly south of the Pyrenees by the Frankish Kingdom in the early 6th century and then lost southern Spain to the Byzantines, but rallied to first conquer the western and northern coastal regions for the first time and then gained control of the whole peninsula by expelling the Byzantines in the early 7th century. The Visigothic Kingdom was now at its apex. It had retained more of the Roman culture than the rest of the former western half of the empire, and is the only kingdom in the west known to have founded new cities in the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Moreover, at least one of these new cities was served by aqueducts. However, none of this halted the rapid Umayyad Conquest in the early 8th century, which swept away every vestige of Visigothic power save for the small successor state in Asturias, which is traditionally seen as the root of the Reconquista.
Most of Spain would therefore spend at least a few centuries under the relatively advanced rule of the Muslim conquerors, but not so large parts of Catalonia. In the late 8th century, after the Franks had beaten back the Arab forces in what is now France, Charlemagne invaded the Umayyad Caliphate from the north, and by 785 its northern reaches (including Figueres) were under Frankish control. This era of Frankish conquest culminated with the capture of Barcelona in 802. Barcelona then became the southernmost and most powerful of the collection of counties established by the Franks. Royal authority waned from the late 9th century onwards, and as happened in large parts of France, the counties south of the Pyrenees became more or less independent, contributing to the development of a separate Catalan identity. Barcelona profited from the power vacuum and came to dominate most of the region. In 1137, the reigning Count of Barcelona also gained control of the Kingdom of Aragón (to the west of Catalonia). Catalonia was then reorganized into a principality, now including the areas that had remained under Umayyad control for much longer and mostly coinciding with its modern borders.
Naturally, this centralisation of power was met with resistance in some places. One such place was the Empordà, the region in which Figueres is located. In a bid to break the power of the local count, Figueres was given town rights, in an attempt to establish it as the centre of power in the northern Empordà. Despite a tumultuous start, in which the count burned down the fledgling town, this bid was successful on both counts: the count was defeated and Figueres slowly developed into the central town in the area.
At the same time, Catalonia became the driving force behind an era of Aragonese expansion. By the mid-15th century, they controlled Valencia, the Balearic Islands Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the southern half of the Italian peninsula (this helps explain why Catalan is still spoken in parts of Sardinia). All of these constituent states were allowed to remain politically independent from each other. However, at the time when Aragonese power reached its maximum territorial extent, Catalonia itself had started to stagnate. In addition to the outbreaks of plague that, well, plagued most of Europe from the mid-14th century onwards, political issues were also at play. In 1410, the House of Catalonia that had ruled Aragón went extinct, and was succeeded by the same house that ruled Castile/Castilla. Although personal union and de facto unification would not happen until 1469 and 1516 respectively, this marks the beginning of tension between the increasingly absolutist, Spanish-speaking monarchs and the Catalan-speaking local population, the ruling class of which had spent centuries building a system that limited royal power in favour of decentralisation. This tension sparked numerous revolts and civil wars and in many ways lives on in the relationship between Catalonia and the rest of Spain in the present.
The era of Habsburg rule, the start of which coincides with Spanish unification, was very rough for Catalonia. The reorientation of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic was already disadvantageous because of sheer geography, but this was compounded by the fact that Aragón in general was treated as second class by the Spanish kings. Trade is a great example of this too: Castilla and Aragón had not really been politically integrated and as the vast Spanish colonial empire was ruled entirely as a part of Castilla, the Aragonese were barred from trading with it. This was not such a problem for Figueres, which was too far from the coast to really benefit from maritime trade, but all of Catalonia would start to suffer when Spain overextended itself militarily and financially from the second half of the 16th century onwards, causing repeated bankruptcies.
In a bid to steady the ship, from 1621 onwards the Spanish government attempted to impose a military contribution on all parts of the country. Although Catalonia was far from the only place where this was met with resistance, the policy was especially disliked here as it violated Catalan law. The next war between France and Spain erupted in 1635, and as usual Spain wasted no time in overextending itself. The ensuing economic upheaval, renewed efforts to increase taxes, and strain on the population near the French-Catalan border (which was one of the theatres of the war) were the last straw for the Catalans, who attempted to crown the King of France as their sovereign. However, this backfired rather badly. Shortly thereafter, Louis XIV became King of France, and if there was one 17th-century ruler who was not going to accept Catalan autonomy, it was the man who would come to define absolutism. Moreover, the threat of France advancing south of the Pyrenees caused Spain to focus its attention on Catalonia. As a result, Catalonia spent the remaining 18 years until the peace of 1659 (which, amongst others, formalised the French annexation of the parts of Catalonia north of the Pyrenees and the ensuing suppression of the Catalan identity there) being ravaged by war, compounded by repeated outbreaks of the plague. By the end, the Catalans themselves had become so sick of the French that they largely sided with Spain (which offered some concessions). Figueres itself was repeatedly occupied by armies on both sides during this period, and the annexation of what now became French Catalonia meant it was now the first town of note south of the border.
The war had utterly ravaged Spain economically, and (probably) courtesy of the Habsburgs’ extreme penchant for incest, it became clear in the following years that its last king was incapable of producing an heir. Spain was in a tailspin, and by the time the royal line died out in 1700, it was no longer in control of its own destiny. The Austrian Habsburg branch and the French Bourbons each had competing successors, sparking the War of the Spanish Succession which raged on until 1714. The basic problem was that the Spanish Empire was still far too large to make full Austrian or French acquisition palatable to the other European powers, but naturally the division of their empire was not exactly popular in Spain. As France was closer geographically, their candidate, Philip (Louis XIV’s grandson) was able to claim the throne first as Philip V. He entered Spain via Figueres, and marked the occasion by marrying in the town church. However, the Catalans were still sick of the French, and were one of few constituent parts of the Empire to declare for Charles, the Habsburg candidate. Once again, this backfired. Although the war itself stayed away from Catalonia for the most part, existing divisions between the Austrians and their British allies became untenable when Charles inherited the Austrian throne in 1711. A compromise was hammered out where Philip V was accepted as King of Spain, in exchange for giving up Belgium, most Spanish possessions in Italy, and his claim to the French throne. His line still sits the Spanish throne today.
Thus, Catalonia had made an enemy of its new king, who had by then already abolished the division between Castilla and Aragón, and with it the age-old separate Catalan system, through his Nueva Planta decrees. The Catalan language was also increasingly suppressed. In spite of all the turmoil, the Catalan economy had started to recover towards the end of the Habsburg era and continued to do so under the Spanish Bourbons. On account of its increased military significance, Figueres saw particular investment in the form of the massive citadel that overlooks the city. As a result, the population tripled to over 5000 people in the span of 60 years. In spite of this, revolutionary France took the citadel twice, both times without firing a shot.
After the period of modernization in the 18th century, 19th-century Spain started to badly lag behind its counterparts. Most of its colonies won their independence in the first third of the century, and the motherland remained quite rural and underdeveloped. The exception to the rule was Catalonia, the only part of the country where the Industrial Revolution really took hold, although even here development was somewhat stifled by the government on the one hand, and civil war on the other. A new succession crisis had led to a division between the liberals and the conservative Carlists. As the Carlists were open to restoring some Catalan autonomy, they also drew a lot of support from Catalonia. However, Figueres remained on the side of the liberal government, repelling Carlist military action on multiple occasions in the three Carlist wars between 1833 and 1876.
The post-1876 settlement started to unravel in the early 20th century, culminating in the royal-backed military coup of 1923. When the military dictatorship fell in 1930, it soon brought the monarchy with it. The newly-established republic was extremely unstable, and finally collapsed in 1936 when, following the victory of the left in that year’s elections, the right and the military joined forces to instigate another coup, triggering the Spanish Civil War. By now, the right had become more extreme, with fascist influence rapidly increasing (Germany and Italy were both militarily involved), and – to put it mildly – no longer in favour of regional autonomy (although it should not be said that the republican side was moderate, with a social revolution being carried out in the republican-held areas in response to the coup). Catalonia, which was by then and is now more left-leaning than most of the country, inevitably became a bedrock of the republican side, in spite of significant divisions between the national and regional governments. However, the republicans lost more and more ground to the right, now dominated by General Franco, and their cause definitively collapsed in early 1939. Figueres was especially hard-hit, with three-quarters of the buildings being destroyed by bombings or fire. At the very end of the war, with republican forces fleeing for France, the citadel was very briefly the final seat of the republican government before it, together with all those republicans who could, fled the country. While the republican side was responsible for tens of thousands of executions of political opponents, the combined executions by the Francoite nationalists during and after the war would reach the hundreds of thousands, to say nothing of the other civilians and soldiers killed. Estimates for the total death toll range from the low hundreds of thousands to about one million.
For everyone whose first language was not Spanish in particular, the misery was not over, as Franco’s military regime embarked on by far the worst wave of forced Hispanization in the country’s history, especially in its earlier years. In the latter half of the dictatorship, Spain pivoted to aggressive attraction of foreign companies and investment, triggering an economic boom. Despite this, Franco’s dictatorship – thankfully – collapsed upon his death in 1975, with both the monarchy and democracy being restored. Catalonia was granted partial autonomy, but the chaos surrounding the 2017 (attempt at) independence referendum shows how deep divisions still run.
And what about Figueres? After a long and painful period of reconstruction, the development of the nearby Costa Brava as a tourist destination from the latter Franco years onwards helped trigger newfound economic and population growth that has largely continued into the present. At just under 50000 inhabitants, it remains the regional centre, even boasting a station on the high speed railway line from Barcelona into France.
And of course, Figueres is also notable as the birthplace of Salvador Dalí. As much as he became controversial with age, in no small part due to his support of Franco, he remains one of the best-known exponents of surrealist art. Figueres retains a museum dedicated to him. As for sports, it is the hometown of 2013 Moto3 world champion Maverick Viñales. Although a frequent stopoff for the Volta a Catalunya (including this year, when Ethan Vernon beat Matthew Brennan in a sprint) , it has never hosted the Vuelta before.
The route
After the endless talk about things that aren’t cycling, it’s time to do the opposite about the route, because there isn’t much to say. The start is near the aforementioned Dalí museum in the city centre, the finish is a bit further north next to the biggest parking lot they could find. Although the route is slightly less untechnical than it looks on the map courtesy of a number of pretty narrow roads, this is still a very speedy course on account of the flatness and relative lack of corners.
The church, with the Dalí museum to the left (picture by Hullie at Wikimedia Commons)
As such, this will be the shortest stage if you’re watching everything in full on television. However, if you find yourself with a lot of free time you don’t know what to do with as a result, I have good news: I wanted to lay down the broader strokes of Spanish history in this post and it got out of hand even by my standards. Blame Unipublic for not posting the full route and giving me too much time to write about things that aren’t related to cycling.
Map and profile
Start
It’s been a pretty rough transfer overnight – 20-kilometre trip to the airport, flight into (presumably) Girona, then another 50-kilometre transfer for the riders, and a 500-kilometre drive for the caravan – but at last, the race has arrived in Figueres. The long transfer is definitely a big factor in why there’s a TTT, as it allows for a 5pm start even with Unipublic sensibly avoiding racing in the dark this time round. However, the only reason such a late start is needed is because they planned a pretty random Gran Salida and then decided against having either a third rest day or an additional stage in France to make the trip back to Spain easier on the riders, so they really don’t deserve a pass for this decision given that it benefits precisely nobody other than themselves.
Right, that’s enough criticism of bad logistical planning, let’s talk about where we actually are. Although there was a village where Figueres is now situated in Roman times, the site didn’t develop into a town until the 13th century. As this development had a lot to do with the political situation at the time, this is probably a good time to talk Spanish history. And by talk Spanish history, I mean really talk Spanish history – it’s both less fragmented and less well-known internationally, so I’m going to stray from my usual format and go through the broader strokes of Spanish history on the first Spanish stage. As we’re in Catalonia, it will be from something of a Catalan perspective.
A landmark event in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Between this famous moment and the perhaps even more pivotal defeat at Adrianople to the Goths (who had not yet split into two branches at that point) in 376, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Visigoths were fiercely anti-Roman, however in fact they were quite Romanized and usually happy to ally with Rome, especially against the Huns who had pushed them out of their original lands in the years before Adrianople. Indeed, both Adrianople and the Sack were driven in significant part by Rome badly mismanaging its relationship with the Goths/Visigoths, and even then the Visigothic Sack was fairly mild compared to the one by the Vandals in 455.
This combination of Roman weakness and on-and-off alliance with the crumbling Empire explains the early trajectory of the Visigothic Kingdom. After sacking Rome, they were allowed to settle in what is now southern France. With the exception of a first attempt at invading the Iberian Peninsula at the behest of the Romans in 416 and a few brief campaigns against the Romans, their settlement was stable by the standards of the time for the first decades. After allying with Rome to repel Attila the Hun in 451, the Romans once again invited them to invade Iberia in 456, sparking an era of expansion on both sides of the Pyrenees that lasted until after the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. From this point on, Catalonia was almost uninterruptedly part of the Visigothic Kingdom for well over two centuries.
The Visigoths were pushed mostly south of the Pyrenees by the Frankish Kingdom in the early 6th century and then lost southern Spain to the Byzantines, but rallied to first conquer the western and northern coastal regions for the first time and then gained control of the whole peninsula by expelling the Byzantines in the early 7th century. The Visigothic Kingdom was now at its apex. It had retained more of the Roman culture than the rest of the former western half of the empire, and is the only kingdom in the west known to have founded new cities in the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Moreover, at least one of these new cities was served by aqueducts. However, none of this halted the rapid Umayyad Conquest in the early 8th century, which swept away every vestige of Visigothic power save for the small successor state in Asturias, which is traditionally seen as the root of the Reconquista.
Most of Spain would therefore spend at least a few centuries under the relatively advanced rule of the Muslim conquerors, but not so large parts of Catalonia. In the late 8th century, after the Franks had beaten back the Arab forces in what is now France, Charlemagne invaded the Umayyad Caliphate from the north, and by 785 its northern reaches (including Figueres) were under Frankish control. This era of Frankish conquest culminated with the capture of Barcelona in 802. Barcelona then became the southernmost and most powerful of the collection of counties established by the Franks. Royal authority waned from the late 9th century onwards, and as happened in large parts of France, the counties south of the Pyrenees became more or less independent, contributing to the development of a separate Catalan identity. Barcelona profited from the power vacuum and came to dominate most of the region. In 1137, the reigning Count of Barcelona also gained control of the Kingdom of Aragón (to the west of Catalonia). Catalonia was then reorganized into a principality, now including the areas that had remained under Umayyad control for much longer and mostly coinciding with its modern borders.
Naturally, this centralisation of power was met with resistance in some places. One such place was the Empordà, the region in which Figueres is located. In a bid to break the power of the local count, Figueres was given town rights, in an attempt to establish it as the centre of power in the northern Empordà. Despite a tumultuous start, in which the count burned down the fledgling town, this bid was successful on both counts: the count was defeated and Figueres slowly developed into the central town in the area.
At the same time, Catalonia became the driving force behind an era of Aragonese expansion. By the mid-15th century, they controlled Valencia, the Balearic Islands Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the southern half of the Italian peninsula (this helps explain why Catalan is still spoken in parts of Sardinia). All of these constituent states were allowed to remain politically independent from each other. However, at the time when Aragonese power reached its maximum territorial extent, Catalonia itself had started to stagnate. In addition to the outbreaks of plague that, well, plagued most of Europe from the mid-14th century onwards, political issues were also at play. In 1410, the House of Catalonia that had ruled Aragón went extinct, and was succeeded by the same house that ruled Castile/Castilla. Although personal union and de facto unification would not happen until 1469 and 1516 respectively, this marks the beginning of tension between the increasingly absolutist, Spanish-speaking monarchs and the Catalan-speaking local population, the ruling class of which had spent centuries building a system that limited royal power in favour of decentralisation. This tension sparked numerous revolts and civil wars and in many ways lives on in the relationship between Catalonia and the rest of Spain in the present.
The era of Habsburg rule, the start of which coincides with Spanish unification, was very rough for Catalonia. The reorientation of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic was already disadvantageous because of sheer geography, but this was compounded by the fact that Aragón in general was treated as second class by the Spanish kings. Trade is a great example of this too: Castilla and Aragón had not really been politically integrated and as the vast Spanish colonial empire was ruled entirely as a part of Castilla, the Aragonese were barred from trading with it. This was not such a problem for Figueres, which was too far from the coast to really benefit from maritime trade, but all of Catalonia would start to suffer when Spain overextended itself militarily and financially from the second half of the 16th century onwards, causing repeated bankruptcies.
In a bid to steady the ship, from 1621 onwards the Spanish government attempted to impose a military contribution on all parts of the country. Although Catalonia was far from the only place where this was met with resistance, the policy was especially disliked here as it violated Catalan law. The next war between France and Spain erupted in 1635, and as usual Spain wasted no time in overextending itself. The ensuing economic upheaval, renewed efforts to increase taxes, and strain on the population near the French-Catalan border (which was one of the theatres of the war) were the last straw for the Catalans, who attempted to crown the King of France as their sovereign. However, this backfired rather badly. Shortly thereafter, Louis XIV became King of France, and if there was one 17th-century ruler who was not going to accept Catalan autonomy, it was the man who would come to define absolutism. Moreover, the threat of France advancing south of the Pyrenees caused Spain to focus its attention on Catalonia. As a result, Catalonia spent the remaining 18 years until the peace of 1659 (which, amongst others, formalised the French annexation of the parts of Catalonia north of the Pyrenees and the ensuing suppression of the Catalan identity there) being ravaged by war, compounded by repeated outbreaks of the plague. By the end, the Catalans themselves had become so sick of the French that they largely sided with Spain (which offered some concessions). Figueres itself was repeatedly occupied by armies on both sides during this period, and the annexation of what now became French Catalonia meant it was now the first town of note south of the border.
The war had utterly ravaged Spain economically, and (probably) courtesy of the Habsburgs’ extreme penchant for incest, it became clear in the following years that its last king was incapable of producing an heir. Spain was in a tailspin, and by the time the royal line died out in 1700, it was no longer in control of its own destiny. The Austrian Habsburg branch and the French Bourbons each had competing successors, sparking the War of the Spanish Succession which raged on until 1714. The basic problem was that the Spanish Empire was still far too large to make full Austrian or French acquisition palatable to the other European powers, but naturally the division of their empire was not exactly popular in Spain. As France was closer geographically, their candidate, Philip (Louis XIV’s grandson) was able to claim the throne first as Philip V. He entered Spain via Figueres, and marked the occasion by marrying in the town church. However, the Catalans were still sick of the French, and were one of few constituent parts of the Empire to declare for Charles, the Habsburg candidate. Once again, this backfired. Although the war itself stayed away from Catalonia for the most part, existing divisions between the Austrians and their British allies became untenable when Charles inherited the Austrian throne in 1711. A compromise was hammered out where Philip V was accepted as King of Spain, in exchange for giving up Belgium, most Spanish possessions in Italy, and his claim to the French throne. His line still sits the Spanish throne today.
Thus, Catalonia had made an enemy of its new king, who had by then already abolished the division between Castilla and Aragón, and with it the age-old separate Catalan system, through his Nueva Planta decrees. The Catalan language was also increasingly suppressed. In spite of all the turmoil, the Catalan economy had started to recover towards the end of the Habsburg era and continued to do so under the Spanish Bourbons. On account of its increased military significance, Figueres saw particular investment in the form of the massive citadel that overlooks the city. As a result, the population tripled to over 5000 people in the span of 60 years. In spite of this, revolutionary France took the citadel twice, both times without firing a shot.
After the period of modernization in the 18th century, 19th-century Spain started to badly lag behind its counterparts. Most of its colonies won their independence in the first third of the century, and the motherland remained quite rural and underdeveloped. The exception to the rule was Catalonia, the only part of the country where the Industrial Revolution really took hold, although even here development was somewhat stifled by the government on the one hand, and civil war on the other. A new succession crisis had led to a division between the liberals and the conservative Carlists. As the Carlists were open to restoring some Catalan autonomy, they also drew a lot of support from Catalonia. However, Figueres remained on the side of the liberal government, repelling Carlist military action on multiple occasions in the three Carlist wars between 1833 and 1876.
The post-1876 settlement started to unravel in the early 20th century, culminating in the royal-backed military coup of 1923. When the military dictatorship fell in 1930, it soon brought the monarchy with it. The newly-established republic was extremely unstable, and finally collapsed in 1936 when, following the victory of the left in that year’s elections, the right and the military joined forces to instigate another coup, triggering the Spanish Civil War. By now, the right had become more extreme, with fascist influence rapidly increasing (Germany and Italy were both militarily involved), and – to put it mildly – no longer in favour of regional autonomy (although it should not be said that the republican side was moderate, with a social revolution being carried out in the republican-held areas in response to the coup). Catalonia, which was by then and is now more left-leaning than most of the country, inevitably became a bedrock of the republican side, in spite of significant divisions between the national and regional governments. However, the republicans lost more and more ground to the right, now dominated by General Franco, and their cause definitively collapsed in early 1939. Figueres was especially hard-hit, with three-quarters of the buildings being destroyed by bombings or fire. At the very end of the war, with republican forces fleeing for France, the citadel was very briefly the final seat of the republican government before it, together with all those republicans who could, fled the country. While the republican side was responsible for tens of thousands of executions of political opponents, the combined executions by the Francoite nationalists during and after the war would reach the hundreds of thousands, to say nothing of the other civilians and soldiers killed. Estimates for the total death toll range from the low hundreds of thousands to about one million.
For everyone whose first language was not Spanish in particular, the misery was not over, as Franco’s military regime embarked on by far the worst wave of forced Hispanization in the country’s history, especially in its earlier years. In the latter half of the dictatorship, Spain pivoted to aggressive attraction of foreign companies and investment, triggering an economic boom. Despite this, Franco’s dictatorship – thankfully – collapsed upon his death in 1975, with both the monarchy and democracy being restored. Catalonia was granted partial autonomy, but the chaos surrounding the 2017 (attempt at) independence referendum shows how deep divisions still run.
And what about Figueres? After a long and painful period of reconstruction, the development of the nearby Costa Brava as a tourist destination from the latter Franco years onwards helped trigger newfound economic and population growth that has largely continued into the present. At just under 50000 inhabitants, it remains the regional centre, even boasting a station on the high speed railway line from Barcelona into France.
And of course, Figueres is also notable as the birthplace of Salvador Dalí. As much as he became controversial with age, in no small part due to his support of Franco, he remains one of the best-known exponents of surrealist art. Figueres retains a museum dedicated to him. As for sports, it is the hometown of 2013 Moto3 world champion Maverick Viñales. Although a frequent stopoff for the Volta a Catalunya (including this year, when Ethan Vernon beat Matthew Brennan in a sprint) , it has never hosted the Vuelta before.
The route
After the endless talk about things that aren’t cycling, it’s time to do the opposite about the route, because there isn’t much to say. The start is near the aforementioned Dalí museum in the city centre, the finish is a bit further north next to the biggest parking lot they could find. Although the route is slightly less untechnical than it looks on the map courtesy of a number of pretty narrow roads, this is still a very speedy course on account of the flatness and relative lack of corners.
The church, with the Dalí museum to the left (picture by Hullie at Wikimedia Commons)
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