Was Spain different? Agricultural change in Spain in a southern European perspective, 1961 to 1985

'Spain is different' has often been a way of explaining some significant and distinctive Spanish characteristics. This expression can also be applied to the agrarian changes that took place in Spain between 19 60 and 1985. While the general Western trend was for cultivated acreage to decline, the Spanish countryside experienced a great expansion. This paper identifies other differences between the Spanish and the more general southern European experience. These became evident in the 25 years before Spain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1986 and have marked the path Spanish agriculture has taken ever since. Throughout this process, some of the distinctive features established under the Franco dictatorship continued to reinforce the peculiarities of the agrarian transformation in Spain. Here we focus on all those changes in an endeavour to assess whether agricultural change in Spain took a different course to that of other European countries.