The illiberal and un-conservative extremes are in the media driver's seat, garnering way more clout and air time than the actual numbers merit.

I asked the guide why the tour showed nothing of Franco. “We don’t like to think about him,” she said. Indeed, after Franco died, and the dictatorship ended, the parties of the left and the right made a deal called the Pacto del Olvido, the Pact of Forgetting.

Small victories against those who would mock the old are very welcome, if few and far between.

She still follows the lesson of her mother: Do the best you can for the community you live in.