Spain:
Location: Southwestern Europe, bordering the Bay of Biscay, Mediterranean Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, and Pyrenees Mountains, southwest of France.
Capital: Madrid
Climate: temperate; clear, hot summers in interior, more moderate and cloudy along coast;
cloudy, cold winters in interior, partly cloudy and cool along coast.
Population: 40,280,780 (July 2004 est.)
Ethnic Make-up: composite of Mediterranean and Nordic types
Religions: Roman Catholic 94%, other 6%
Government: parliamentary monarchy.
Economy:
The Importance of Family:
Apartments next to a marina in Malaga. Urban families often share bedrooms, and common rooms may be used for multiple purposes.
http://www.everyculture.com/Sa-Th/Spain.html#ixzz2RuuIzSuC
Machismo:
Weird Laws:
Capital: Madrid
Climate: temperate; clear, hot summers in interior, more moderate and cloudy along coast;
cloudy, cold winters in interior, partly cloudy and cool along coast.
Population: 40,280,780 (July 2004 est.)
Ethnic Make-up: composite of Mediterranean and Nordic types
Religions: Roman Catholic 94%, other 6%
Government: parliamentary monarchy.
Economy:
- Spain’s economic crisis turned into a full-scale political crisis in 2012, and the momentum for deeper economic and structural reforms appears to be largely stalled.
- The burst of the housing-market bubble in 2008 meant that the global economic crisis hit Spain hard in 2009.
- Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party attempted to use spending on public works and increased unemployment benefits to address the slowdown.
- This, combined with the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent banking crisis, caused the budget deficit to grow rapidly.
- The conservative Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, won the November 2011 election and has introduced the largest budget deficit–reduction plan in Spain’s history.
- The European Union announced a bailout of €100 billion for the Spanish economy in June 2012. Spain’s unemployment rate is 25 percent.
- In order to solve Spain's debt it requires a radical rethink in Madrid, but above all in Brussels and Berlin.
- Spain's government should be free to focus less on fiscal austerity and more on cleaning up the banks.
- Its European partners should also help by allowing joint rescue funds to be injected directly into banks.
The Importance of Family:
- The family is the basis of the social structure and includes both the nuclear and the extended family, which sometimes provides both a social and a financial support network.
- Today, it is less common than previously for family members to work in a family business, as personal preferences are important and university education is general.
- The structure and the size of the family vary, but generally, people live until longer lives, have fewer children than before, and fewer people live in their homes with extended family.
- Spain is a parliamentary monarchy with a bicameral legislature.
- The current king, Juan Carlos I (the grandson of Alfonso XIII, who was displaced by the Second Republic) is the first monarch to reign following the Franco period.
- In 1978 the constitution that would govern Spain in its new era took effect.
- The years under the constitutional regime have brought Spain into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Community—and therefore, politically and economically closer to Europe—as well as into ever wider circles of global involvement.
- The major change that has come about in Spain's political organization under the modern constitution is the creation of seventeen "autonomous regions" into which the fifty provinces are distributed. Each of the autonomous regions has its own regional government, budget, and ministries; these replicate those at the national level.
- http://www.everyculture.com/Sa-Th/Spain.html#ixzz2RuuIzSuC
Apartments next to a marina in Malaga. Urban families often share bedrooms, and common rooms may be used for multiple purposes.
http://www.everyculture.com/Sa-Th/Spain.html#ixzz2RuuIzSuC
Machismo:
- Machismo is the word for male dominance, and the culture of old men who created it has changed dramatically.
- Spain is a very equalitarian society, the birth rate is the one of the lowest in Europe, andwomen are present at university and work.
- The sexual division of labor varies by region and social class. In rural areas with a plow culture, men do most of the agricultural tasks, and women garden and keep house.
- Spanish women under Castilian law inherit property equally with their brothers. They may also manage and dispose of it freely. This independence of control was traditionally relinquished to the husband upon marriage, but unmarried women or widows could wield the power of their properties independently. Today spouses are absolutely equal under the law.
- Royal and noble women succeed to family titles if they have no brothers. In some areas of Spain, a woman may be heir to the family estate, but if she is not and instead marries an heir, she lives under the roof and rule of her husband and his parents.
- Women do not change their birth surnames at marriage in any part of Spain and can have public identities quite separate from those of their husbands.
- Women were traditionally homemakers. Today they are found throughout the business, professional, and political worlds.
- In rural and working-class families, too, married women now often work outside the home and so experience both the independence and the frustrations of working women in countries where the female workforce emerged earlier.
- Spanish couples began controlling their family size long ago, and Spain now permits divorce, so more Spanish women are finding new kinds of freedom from their traditional roles as wives and mothers of large families.
- Despite women's traditional association with home-making, Spaniards have long accepted the independence of women and the prominence of some of them (including their queens and noble women).
- Women's present emergence in the workforce, in the professions, and in government occurred in Spain without a marked feminist rebellion.
- http://www.everyculture.com/Sa-Th/Spain.html#ixzz2RuuPfcgF
Weird Laws:
- In Spain, you cannot leave your horse in your backseat for more than 30 minutes.
- It is illegal to urinate in the street.
- It is illegal to spit in the street.