In the decade After The Death of Francisco Franco y Bahamonde in 1975, Spain experienced several powerful transformations. The political transition from a rigid dictatorship to an active parliamentary democracy was widely acknowledged as a highly remarkable event in West European history. Much more subtle, but equally remarkable in the long run, was Spain’s social and economic transition, described as Spain’s “economic miracle,” which brought a comparatively isolated, conservative social order to the threshold of an advanced industrial democracy. In the decades after the 1930’s Civil War, Spain still possessed the social structures and values of a orthodox, less developed nation. By the late 1980s, Spanish society had already taken on most of the principal characteristics of postindustrial Europe, including a declining rate of births and of population growth generally, an erosion of the nuclear family, a drop in the proportion of the work force in agriculture, and changes in the role of women in society.

In the late 1980s, Spain continued to rank at the low end of the list of advanced industrial democracies in terms of social welfare. Its citizens enjoyed the usual range of social welfare benefits, including health coverage, retirement benefits, and unemployment insurance, but coverage was less comprehensive than that in most other West European countries. The retirement system was under increasing pressure because of the aging population. Housing construction just barely managed to keep pace with rapid urbanization in the 1970s, and by the late 1980s the nation had to begin to address some of the “quality of life” issues connected with housing. The society ranked high on some indicators of health care, such as physician availability, but there were still residual health problems more reminiscent of the Third World, particularly a high incidence of communicable diseases. There were dramatic gains in reducing the infant mortality rate, but severe problems in the areas of public health, safety, and environmental concerns–industrial accidents and air, water, and noise pollution–were a direct outgrowth of uncontrolled, rapid industrialization.