er as shown in the playing-matches and corridas of Spain.
One of the perennial questions in Spanish history and Spanish culture is to what degree Spain is "part of Europe?" On one level, the question seems so straightforward as to be absurd. Geographically, Spain is the most European place in Europe, the very end of the that peninsula of Asia that has arbitrarily been defined as a continent in its own right. Culturally, Spain has played an often-distinguished and sometimes-leading part in European history.
Nevertheless, the sense has long persisted that Spain is a place apart, that the Pyrenees are more than another mountain range. Spain alone of Western European countries was largely under Muslim rule for several hundred years during the Middle Ages. Much later, in the eighteenth century, Spain largely turned its back on European cultural trends, and it is often said that Spain only "rejoined Europe" after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1975. If so, then it may be said that the maturation of Spain's role as a modern European country was marked at least symbolically by the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Appropriately, Barcelona 1992 was not only a public triumph for the new Spain, it was also a triumph for Spanish athletics. Prior to 1992, Spain had only captured four gold medals in the history of modern Olympic competition; in 1992, Spanish carried home (or, perhaps we may say, kept at home) thirteen gold medals, and a total of twenty-two medals (Smith, 1992). At least so far as Olympic competition is concerned, Spain had arrived.
Spain had arrived much earlier in the "world game" of soccer--or, as it is called in Spanish, futbol. (In most of the world, "football" means soccer, and the name is far more appropriate to soccer than to the American game of that name.) Spain has not yet been a World Cup winner, but it has a steady record of credible Cup competition over the years, and tied with Germany in ...