introduction

Part 1.
A landscape where one lives in the present while embracing the past
-The Pilgrim's Way, in search of the hometowns and tombs of the saints
-The Silver Path, a path to discover the beauty of ancient Rome and the Middle Ages
-Don Quixote's Journey, a Path in Search of Justice and Freedom
-Encounter the mysteries of the East in Europe
-Madrid, the capital and cultural city of Spain
-Spanish Natural Parks
- Spanish food pilgrimage and representative foods
(Prosciutto/Wine/Olives)

Part 2: Where people who think they are the next greatest after God live
-The sun that rules life
-I am the next greatest king after God.
-You can't do this, Hidalgo.
Spain, a hidden land far and wide
-The glory of the great empire that disappeared like a meteor
(The Century of Disillusionment / The 18th Century of the Bourbons / The Conflict Between Liberals and Conservatives / The Spanish Civil War / Back to the Center of Europe)
-We pride ourselves on our diversity.
-We are not Spain: Basque Country
-A nation within a nation: Catalonia
- A heterogeneous social and cultural spectrum: Galicia
-I made today's Spain: Asturias
-Heart of Spanish Honor: Castilla
-Central and South American countries resembling Castile
-Land of Duende: Andalusia
-Castle and lion chain and two-colored band

Part 3: A country that doesn't produce 100 honor students, but does produce one genius.
-Painters with unquenchable passion and a fanatical artistic spirit
(El Greco, the mystic / Velazquez, the greatest painter / Goya, the founder of modern painting / Picasso, the painter who could have become a god / Joan Miró, the idol of children / Salvador Dali, the savior of painting)
-Spanish movies
(Eternal heretic Luis Buñuel / Director of The Land of Spain, Pedro Almodóvar)
-Spanish music
(Spanish opera, zarzuela/spiritual song and dance, flamenco/Spanish folk instruments, etc.)
-Talavera de la Reina ceramics
-The only one architecture in the world, Gaudi

Part 4: A Life of Leisure and Consideration
-The center of common people's lives, the bar
-Cafeteria and Tertullia
-Plaza culture and festivals
-I want to share the money too, Kiniella.
-Another leisure of life, soccer
- All responsibility rests with the individual.
-Ke Kuappa! Ke Linda! (You're pretty! You're cool!)
-Madrid, the dog poop paradise
-People who cherish and love Spanish
-Heaven for the weak
-Education Building of ESADE Business School
-People who respond
-The aesthetics of slowness
While You Were Sleeping, Siesta Culture
-Stores that make a living from history
-Miracle Babysitter, Maria Milagrosi

Part 5.
Spain's Shadow
-Spanish nail clippers can't cut nails.
-Pako, a prospective lawyer representing the unemployed
-Judge Jeong Man-man, Jose
-Airport customs police, a symbol of bureaucracy
-Give me back my blanket, Spanish Gypsy
-Romanian youth thrown into car
-Stigma of the past

A book that explains the source of Spain's unpredictable charm, a foreign country in Europe.

Spain, located on the Iberian Peninsula at the southwestern tip of Europe.
The only passage to the continent is blocked by the Pyrenees Mountains.
Spain, which has fallen into a state of ruin without any substance, leaving behind its glorious history that stretched to every corner of the world so that the sun never sets, is sometimes referred to as “a land roughly tacked on to the buttocks of Europe.” However, this land, which makes us feel the hidden potential everywhere, shows that beauty is not only about grandeur.
Spain, where nature takes precedence over reason, where rationality is more paradoxical than rational, and where emotion is more oriented than intellect, is both European and not European.
To protect Catholicism, they created the Inquisition and persecuted countless Jews and Arabs as heretics, maintaining Catholic orthodoxy. However, to understand their religion, which does not enjoy deep thought or formality, one must separate clericalism and priestlyism.
People who are obsessed with an inferiority complex due to useless pride are arrogant and unpredictable, but sometimes they are kind enough to give everything, and they are the perfect answer to poetic romanticism.
Although it produced masters such as Picasso, Dali, Gaudi, Goya, and Miró, it did not nurture its students, form a school of thought, or compile theoretical books.
There may be one genius who grows up naturally, but there is no interest in raising a hundred excellent students.
Professor Ahn Young-ok of the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at Korea University, the author of this book, has been studying Spanish literature and art and exploring various parts of Spain for over 30 years, but even now, she hesitates to give a definitive definition to Spain, a country so unpredictable.
Nevertheless, the encounter with a free spirit that is revealed in detail lifts the veil of an identity that was vaguely hidden.

Three Paths to Spain, Three Keywords

The book begins with three paths representing Spanish history.
These are the 'Pilgrim's Way', the 'Silver Way', and the 'Way of Don Quixote'.
These three paths are enough to show the roots of the Spanish people, shaped by the Catholic spirit of Spain, the history of European exchange, and the natural environment.
Even now, Spain lives today as if it were one with history.
Build a house inside a medieval castle built in the 13th century, live in a house built in the 16th century, and drink tea in a square built in the 18th century.
Since everything is historical, we cannot draw a line to protect it.
However, we cannot trample on the history they hold in order to fit into the convenient modern life.
The solution is to live together.

There are three keywords that connect Spain, the wisdom and leisure of coexistence, and the passion that goes with it.
The keywords that will help us piece together the complex puzzle of Spain, which cannot be simply defined in a single word, are ‘realism,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘sense of honor.’
With this in mind, let's read on about Spain.
Despite being pushed to the periphery, subservient to the whims of the great powers from the mid-17th century to the late 20th century, leaving behind a glorious history, you will encounter the free spirit of the Spanish people, who have always been the best.


Realism - What more could you ask for if you could see, hear, and feel things as they are!

Scholars who want to delve deeper into Spain and understand it better often compare it to Germany, its polar opposite in every way.
One of them, the 20th-century Spanish intellectual Ortega, once called the very bottom of the Spanish soul "Mediterraneanism."
The 'Mediterraneanism' he speaks of means extreme materialism.
The Spaniards insist that even in abstract and conceptual religion, one must see it concretely and feel it with one's whole being to truly believe, and the events that take place in each village during Holy Week are proof of this.

Spanish thinkers Cosio and Alcantara called Spanish art 'realism' in the same context.
Spanish people are said to be unimaginative because they prefer things as they are and like to see and touch them directly.
The Spanish way of enjoying things as they are is evident in every aspect of life.
Tourist spots everywhere have a strong smell of artificiality created to make money, but Spain is pristine.
The buildings, the grass, the trees, and the flowers are all wild.
In other European countries, architecture appears as simply a building, whereas in Spain it feels more like a life.
In Europe, they are displayed as monuments, like exhibits in a showcase, while in Spain, they live alongside people's lives.
Those who are faithful to what they can see and touch are particularly vulnerable to deep thought.
The people who theorized their artistic world in the name of critique and introduced it to the world through video production were not the Spanish, but the British, Germans, and French.
So, in Spain, theory is weak in all fields.

Individualism - I must be free, and I am always the best!

Individualism is clearly a flaw for a country or a people.
Because it breaks the harmony and balance of society and creates discord among people.
On the other hand, it is interesting that in Spain this individualism is praised as free creativity and a living life.
So, it is unlikely that Europeans would have a kind eye for the Spanish people.
He would be arrogant and boastful, so he would be rude. He would be driven by emotions rather than reason, so he would sometimes be absurd. He would also seem contradictory because he would have to save face even at the risk of his life.
But there was something that instilled a sense of community in the individualistic Spanish people: the plazas and the festivals held there.
Institutionally, it became the driving force that made Spain a country of festivals, with no day without a festival 365 days a year, and organizationally, it gave birth to collectivism.
In this way, we can see that the negative elements of individualism that could go wrong have been formed in a very positive way.
The Spanish people's individualistic tendencies have expanded and have been expressed politically as 'autonomism'.
Autonomy is also the foundation of Spanish national identity.
Even today, Spain is made up of 17 autonomous regions of various types.
However, we must remember that Spanish autonomy is not a simple diversity understood as the appearance of several regions within a single state, but rather a product of harmony that has reached the peak of extreme contradiction.
Rome, which had defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars and was expanding its power into Europe, had great difficulty occupying Spain.
Rome, trembling in the face of Spain's harsh climate, terrain, and guerrilla warfare, began to plot ways to exploit Spain's weaknesses, and the answer was mutual isolation among the Spaniards.
Historians have recorded that 'the Iberian people are loyal to their families and tribes with all their lives, but they tend to reject or dislike integration with other groups.'
The Roman army, having recognized these shortcomings, was able to easily conquer each region of Spain.
As such, Spain's individualistic tendencies are old and steadfast.
In 2008, when Spain won the European Cup for the first time in 40 years, cars and people in Madrid stopped and cheered all night, but the citizens of Barcelona were quiet.

There is humor that shows the characteristics of each person in the autonomous region.
A euro fell into the toilet.
This is a joke about the attitude of each region's residents.

Castilian: “Hey, what’s that, what’s that one euro?
“I can’t dirty my precious hands over something like that,” he says, arrogantly ignoring her.

Basque: “I can’t help but feel offended that he left without my permission.
“I have to get it out somehow,” he says, looking for an extension cord to pull it out.

Galician: “Why?, the money fell there, how much better it would have been if it hadn’t fallen there,” he mutters.

Andalusians: "Let's make a bet on who can float that coin with our urine", they joke.

Catalan: “Hey, one euro, how dare you put your hand in the toilet to take that out.” Then he takes out another one euro coin and throws it in the toilet.
Then he says, “Okay, now I have a reason to take this money out,” and puts his hand in the toilet and takes it out.

Honor Guard - You can't get your hands dirty with labor!
'Ole!'

Audiences who have encountered true flamenco will involuntarily repeat the words "Ole!" as if possessed. "Ole" is a cry derived from the Arabic word for God, "Allah."
It may seem a bit out of place to talk about Spain, but if you look at Spain's history, you will find many traces of Arab influence.
If Spain received Christianity, law, language, and architecture from Rome, the Arabs who entered Spain in the early 8th century were the ones who brought their astronomy, mathematics, logic, medicine, music, literature, politics, and ideology to Iberia and enriched it.
Even today, one in ten words in the Spanish language has Arabic origins.

Arabs lived in Spain from 711 to 1492, and until just before the Muslims arrived in Spain, the Spaniards had Christianity as their state religion.
The Spaniards, who had fled to the north of Spain, being chased by Muslims, fought a war for 800 years to reclaim their lost land, which was called the 'War of National Restoration.'
The Spanish rulers rewarded those who participated in these wars by granting them a minor title of nobility, called 'hidalgo'.
Hidalgo had a code that said that doing anything other than war would be considered dishonorable, and getting one's hands dirty with labor was considered something only Jews or Muslims in Spain did.

The 'Honorary Hall' that began in this way became surprisingly powerful as it added various colors to Spanish history.
Bound by the code of honor, there were times when, not only did they have to go hungry, they had to kill their wives and children for honor.
In this way, honor emerged as a keyword to understand Spanish society, which placed great importance on family, as it was interpreted in the same sense as hidalgo.
In a society where status, not wealth, was the basis for maintaining a high status, honor became the criterion for distinguishing between noble and illusory families. This irrational view of honor led to the decline of not only individuals and families, but also the nation in Spanish history.
To maintain its reputation as a great empire, Spain had to pour energy and materials into numerous wars, but not only did it relegate money to the dishonorable status of Jews, it also did not even develop industry on the Spanish mainland to avoid trade friction with its colonies.
The widespread belief that doing business here would mean losing one's honor is enough to explain why Spain, once a superpower, was pushed to the periphery, just watching the mood of the great powers.

A book that truly showcases the charm of Spain

The author, Professor Ahn Young-ok, was fascinated by Velazquez's painting 'The Waterseller of Seville' and hoped to go to art school, but fate led him to Spanish literature.
The author's aesthetic sense, literary sensibility, and expertise on Spain combine to create a diverse and intricate portrayal of Spain's history.
The literary narrative, which appropriately unfolds each journey, adds depth, such as the Spanish sentiment seen through Don Quixote's journey, and the appearance of a villain novel that shows the life of a servant under Hidalgo's tyranny.
The history and beauty of Spain, revealed through the paintings of Picasso, Dali, Miró, Velazquez, Goya, and El Greco, allows us to approach Spain's identity more easily and deeply.