Am I the only one who has never figured out Spain? I know it gets millions of visitors a year, and all of them seem to come back with sunburn, bottles of sangria, and perhaps ownership in a time-share. But I never seem to be so lucky.
During my junior year abroad in college, I laid plans to spend the January semester traveling in Spain. I bought For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Hemingway novel, and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. My itinerary was to start in Barcelona and work my way south to Gibraltar. I was interested to learn more about the Spanish Civil War, about which I was hazy, and I have always had a fascination with the politics of Christopher Columbus: a Genovese who convinced a ruthless Spanish court to search for new worlds. With train tickets in hand, however, I succumbed to a lower back inflammation in Vienna, where I was enrolled in school. The dean sent me to a private clinic for a small operation, which went fine, although in hospital I lost not only my prehistoric tail but also all my money. First, my roommate, Steve Schnee, visited me in the clinic. In roommate fashion, he decided I would not be going anywhere during the term break. As such he thought it best if I lent him a few hundred dollars so he could take his girlfriend skiing. Dizzy from anesthesia, I parted with the money. Then the clinic made me pay cash for the operation when I checked out, a Blue Cross policy meaning nothing to glint-eyed Austrian hospital accountants. Stripped of my Austrian shillings—while Schnee was skiing at Innsbruck—I had to walk home from the hospital. While awaiting some money from my parents, I read the only books I had on hand—those of Hemingway and Orwell—which was as close as I got to Spain until the 1990s.
After moving to Europe in 1991, I renewed my quest to visit Spain. It was the era before discount airlines, and the cost of taking a family of four from Switzerland to Geneva felt like back surgery. When my parents came for a visit in 1995, I pooled enough frequent flyer miles for all of us to spend a long weekend in Malaga. Before leaving for the Costa del Sol, I had asked the same Schnee (he repaid the loan about the time Blue Cross reimbursed something like $32.50 for the surgery) what was the nicest part of the Spanish coast. His answer: “Tuscany.” Like many, he rolled his eyes about Spain’s coastal development. Nevertheless, we forged ahead to Malaga, knowing it might be the Spanish Brighton. We spent a day at the Alhambra, motored up and down the sprawling coast, and treated my three-year-old son to a bucket of balls at a golf driving range. Malaga was a high-rise jungle—similar to a resort that a friend described as “white Harlem by the sea.” What saved the visit was the hotel, part of the Spanish parador or inn system that renovates classic properties and serves regional cooking at reasonable prices. What I remember most about the visit were the lovely dinners, which began at 9:30 PM and meandered through many graceful servings. As Miquel de Cervantes once wrote: “Fair and softly goes far.”
After our visit to Malaga, I went to Madrid on business, where one of the dinners started at the appetizing hour of 1 AM. Everyone but me seemed to be smoking and eating octopus. At 4 AM I declined the invitation to move the dinner party into a nearby nightclub. On that business trip, I raced through the Prado, although it felt less like a museum afternoon and more like a drive-by shooting. On another visit to Madrid, I had both my sons in tow, as we were there for a Real Madrid soccer match. Pushing a little culture before we headed to the Bernabeu stadium, I led them into the Prado, where I had one of those moments of fatherly pride and surprise. My youngest son, then 8, walked up to the celebrated painting of the little girl holding a magpie on a leash and then described to me the significance of the bird cage and the nearby cat, the mindlessness of the Spanish royal family, and the artist’s insight into revolutionary culture. I had gone to Madrid expecting such an infomercial about Zinedine Zidane, not Francisco de Goya.
Actually I wound up getting both. After the Sunday night football match, I sent my two boys off with a friend who had a connection to the Real Madrid management. He didn’t think he could get the boys into the locker room, but as Real had won the match 6-0, he thought a few of the team’s all-world players might sign something on their way through the parking lot. The boys had makeshift autograph books and disposable cameras, as I had not dreamed that they had a chance to meet some of the players. I waited in a sidewalk scrum while my sons vanished into the depths of the stadium. An hour later the planet’s happiest boys emerged from the stadium waving stacks of signed papers. I know that after matches, by reputation, millionaire football players are supposed to push little boys aside while chasing down starlets or groupies. But here I can put in a good word for the Real Madrid’s superstar culture. Zidane (according to one son, “painfully shy”) signed his autograph and then stood awkwardly for a picture. David Beckham did more: he interrupted a business conversation to say, “Wait a minute, I have to look after these boys,” signed their books, chatted to them in English, and posed for pictures. So did the gracious Roberto Carlos, who congratulated my son, Charles, for sharing his name. On it went. Whenever the boys approached a star in the parking lot, he took it to be part of his civic obligation to sign autographs. The goal scorer, Raul, introduced the boys to his father. Figo fussed their hair and spoke to them in French. Ronaldo cheerfully stood for photographs and introduced his girlfriend. I am surprised the team did not take the boys clubbing. Unlike me, I think they would have gone.
My memories of visiting Barcelona are more mixed. I went there first in 2003 as part of a family holiday during a weeklong Mediterranean cruise. We docked in the city just as monsoon-like rains came ashore. It had been like that for much of the cruise. By the time we got to a drenched Barcelona, I had the sulking rage of a vacationing Basil Fawlty or Clark Griswald. No matter how hard it was raining I was determined to see the city. On the open double-decker tour bus, I made the children encase themselves in ponchos and ride outside to absorb the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. At his Parc Gruel, I insisted that we picnic outside on the mosaic benches. Needless to say, that day in Barcelona is recalled in family lore as if an outtake from Saturday Night Live. Most of the stories begin: “Remember when Daddy made us put on the ponchos….?” If Salvador Dali were to have painted our day out in Barcelona, it might have featured a father before one of those Goya-esque firing squads together with a soaked picnic basket and a middle-class family, looking like they had been rescued from a shipwreck.
From touring Barcelona in the rain, you would have thought that I had learned my lesson about Catalonia. But recently someone came to my office and proposed meetings in Andorra. The chance to visit the mountainous principality intrigued me. I remember once, at a dinner party, boasting to the guests that I had visited every country in Europe. I then recounted plane changes in Iceland, drives across Macedonia, and summer evenings in Estonia. My bragging held up until someone at the dinner table questioned me about Andorra and San Marino. I tried to say they weren’t really countries—principalities like Vatican City or Monaco—and dropped phrases at the dinner table about “cereal-box monarchies.” The conversation drifted away from my recollections of Albania, but I knew full well that I had not been to Andorra. In fact, I did not even know if it was a country or a country club with a flag, which is why I gladly accepted this invitation to drive across Catalonia and then spend the night in Andorra La Vella, the capital of the principality.
To get from Geneva to Barcelona is a straightforward business of flying for 85 minutes across France and the Pyrenees. But to get to Andorra is another mater. It is 185 kilometers from Barcelona and the roads wind slowly through Catalonia’s barren hills. As I was driving there on Sunday, I decided to visit some castles en route and eat lunch in a parador, remembering our meals in Malaga. (If you want a great holiday, drive from parador to parador around Spain.) But I got lost leaving the airport, wandered aimlessly through some industrial suburbs, and only got to the Cardona castle in the late afternoon. I had expected Catalonia to be tropical, basking in late summer warmth. Instead, a raw northerly wind swept around the Romanesque fortress. When I ordered lunch in the hotel lounge, I got a harangue from the waiter. (Was he “from Barcelona?”) Like all paradors, this one had a superb location, originally suitable to the dukes of Cardona. But all the guests, including myself, struck me as complaining Americans.
I arrived in Andorra at sunset. Because it is country, not a region of either Spain or France, you must clear immigration and customs, although it’s only on the way out that Spanish officers inspect your car. Just across the border, I joined one of those ski resort traffic jams. For more than an hour, on a narrow mountain road, I idled along the main street of St. Julià de Lòria, the first Andorran town across the border. At an altitude of about a thousand meters, Andorra at first reminded me of an Asian shopping center, full of neon signs and glass-fronted department stores. In the background were the steep and harsh ridges of the Pyrenees.
What is Andorra, besides a mile-high duty-free country? Although it is called a principality, the government is more like a constitutional duchy. The co-princes, nominally the heads of state, are figureheads—not unlike like the mannequins you see in many elegant shop windows. Until 1278, however, Andorra was claimed jointly by the Bishop of Urgell, in Catalonia, and by the count of Foix, across the Pyrenees in France. Even then it was a buffer zone between rival and ambitious clerics. The country dates its independence to the peace signed on September 8, 1278. For the next 700 years the co-princes ruled over a smugglers’ paradise, as both the empires of France and Spain found it useful to have a neutral zone between them. Andorra’s sphere of neutrality is like those of Switzerland or Belgium. In 1419, Andorra convened its Council of Land, giving the country one of Europe’s oldest parliaments.
In 1993 voters ratified a constitution, which maintains, in theory, the supremacy of the co-princes. One is the president of France, and the other is the bishop of Deo de Urgell, both of whom appoint local nominees to preside over the country. (Apparently the French president is handed an Andorran passport after being sworn into office.) But power is now vested in the constitution and the parliament, which has 28 members and meets in a capitol that looks like a mountain chalet. I went there just after 9 AM, as I heard morning tours were offered. An elegant woman (perhaps the prime minister’s secretary?) came to where I was waiting and apologized that she could not show me around. She said the parliament was in session. Maybe I could come back at three? Still, I saw the old wooden table and chairs, carved from tree stumps, around which earlier parliamentarians had convened. They projected the image of government as a one-room schoolhouse.
In the age of transnationalism, globalization, and the European Union, what is to be thought of a 400 square kilometer constitutional co-principality that clings to nationhood? Andorra may not tip any balances of power. Nor is it a mouse that roars. But at least it can balance its accounts, and I took pleasure in deconstructing its financial statement, which I collected from the parliament. The country has a population of about 65,000 of whom about half work. Most of the economy revolves around tourism—skiing in winter, day-tripping to shop in summer. The country receives around 11 million visitors a year, which is a staggering number when you consider how hard it is get there. (The capital is also a three-hour drive from Toulouse, France.)
Part of the principality’s appeal is certainly its duty-free status, but it is not correct to say that the country has no taxes. Andorra has no income tax, but among its indirect taxes are tariffs (between 4-12 percent) imposed on imported goods, most of which are sold to the tourist hordes. Banks also pay tax on savings interest. In all, Andorra has a budget of about € (Euro) 300 million, which it spends on schools, the roads, a hospital, and other social programs, a category that may include ski lifts. Residency in Andorra is hard to come by, if you are not born into a local family. 63 percent of the population is of Spanish descent, and 16 percent are Portuguese—the rest being French. Per capita income of € 24,000 is higher than that in Spain, but lower than France. The most telling statistic is life expectancy, which is 91 for women, and 90 for men. It reminded me of a New Yorker cartoon, in which an aged mountain man, confined to his bed, looks up at his doctor and surrounding family, and announces: “You know, I am tired of yogurt.”
During World War II, a lot Allied airmen shot down over Fortress Europa escaped the Third Reich on the mountainous trails that weave through Andorra into Spain. Nevertheless, Andorra has no army today. It has signed various acts of cooperation with bodies like the United Nations and the European Union. Still, the country guards its independence. Local companies must have a majority of Andorran shareholders, although it makes an exception for three Spanish-owned banks. To avoid foreign entanglements, Andorra has resisted borrowing money to enhance its standards of living. The national debt is € 336 million or € 5,169 per head. Debt service, as a percentage of the budget, is less than 2 percent.
Mostly the economy is a service sector, catering to skiers and shoppers, although the local banks do employ about 1000 persons and collectively manage about € 25 billion. Admittedly, when it comes to managing money Andorra is no match for Switzerland, which has more than a trillion Euros in its banks. But Andorran banks are more profitable, with an average return of 24 percent on equity. Most international banks earn less than half that amount. Foreign investors have no chance to invest in the Andorran banking system, which is essentially a local club run by the established families, who must be thrilled at the profitability of the financial sector and its prudent capital ratios, which in some banks are close to 50 percent of outstanding loans.
Because it does not have an income tax, Andorra has the reputation of being a financial paradise. It may be, fiscally, but the rest of it looks like an overgrown ski resort, with a few Hong Kong electronics shops thrown into the mix. Locally, real estate is booming. You see new office buildings getting wedged into downtown plots, much the way Catalonian castles were built up in layers. What is a threat to Andorra’s future? No much that I could see. There is talk that the parliament might swing socialist in the next election, but one man I met described that party as embracing “Andorran socialism,” which may mean free distribution of imported Scotch. I suppose the European Union—like the departed count of Foix—could lay siege to the principality, and demand equalization on such matters as corporate income tax and banking secrecy. Or it could levy heavier import taxes on Andorran goods, like Marlboro cigarettes. But unlike other financial centers, Andorra does not cater much to outsiders, aside from the tourists who have their trunks searched upon departure. The country has neither rail service nor an airline. There is talk of a helicopter connection to Barcelona and Paris, something that might please the co-princes. In the meantime, Andorra—approaching its 600th year as a democracy and indebted to no one—remains one of the few duty-free shops without an airport. Nor, to use a phrase of George Orwell, who near here was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, is it a place where you feel that Big Brother is watching.
