Spain is not an easy reality to grasp: firstly because in spite of its relatively small size it is unbelievably diverse; secondly, because what it has shown to the world over the last five hundred years is not its soul but its shadow. Nevertheless, even in this asuric shadow that gave birth to the Inquisition, there has always been a nobility which not even its enemies could deny, as well as an obsessive sincerity in its service to the divine ideal it had assumed. Spain is a country of kshatriyas, which inherited its ideal of the Holy War from the East, through Islam. It is this, taken in its essentiality, that constitutes its profound attraction. ...   more »