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Seventeen countries in a trench coat
Spain is administratively one country and practically seventeen, and understanding the shape of that is most of what makes a year of travelling here legible. The units are las comunidades autónomas, created by the 1978 Constitution: seventeen of them plus two autonomous cities in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla. They are not provinces or counties. Each has its own parliament, government and president, and each runs its own health service, schools and police arrangements — which is why the paperwork Alex did in Madrid would have looked different in Galicia, and why a public holiday can exist in one community and not the next. Four of them have a co-official language alongside Spanish. The distances are larger than a map suggests, because Spain is the second largest country in western Europe and most of it is a high plateau with mountains at the edges. What makes a year of this practical is the AVE, the high-speed rail network, which is among the most extensive in the world and radiates from Madrid — Seville in two and a half hours, Barcelona in two and a half, Valencia in under two. The radial design is itself a fact about Spanish history: getting from Madrid to anywhere is fast, and getting from one edge to another without passing through Madrid is often slower than it looks. One practical note that Sofía's advice contains. Sitios pequeños — small places — is where the language improves fastest, because in the centre of Seville or Barcelona your Spanish is a convenience and in a town of four thousand it is the only option. It is also where the accents are strongest, which is lesson 56's problem.