A brief history of the late 1970s / early 1980s artistic and socio-cultural movement that occurred in the aftermath of Spain's 'Transition'.
•Origins
During the long rule of the dictator Francisco Franco both public laws and church regulations had enforced a rigid set of social structures aimed at preserving the traditional role of the family, formal relations between the sexes, and control over expression in the press, other media and other important social institutions. Following the death of 'El Caudillo' in 1975 and the restoration of democracy in the late 1970s, Spain then underwent a series of radical changes in politics and society, which was called the 'Transition'. Even before Franco's departure its people had come increasingly into contact with the outside world and changes were starting to wrench at the fabric of traditional society, but once state censorship was relaxed there was a kind of mini explosion - at least in urban areas.
•Madrid Me Mata
In parts of Madrid the changes were profound and certain parts of the city erupted into a hedonistic and cultural wave of events. Things got wild. Pornography exploded, gays and prostitution, both previously brutally repressed, began to become very visible and there was widespread use of recreational drugs by the youth.
"It�s difficult to speak of La movida and explain it to those who didn't live those years. We weren't a generation; we weren't an artistic movement; we weren't a group with a concrete ideology. We were simply a bunch of people that coincided in one of the most explosive moments in the country." - Pedro Almod�var
While new clubs opened up in dirty basements and squatters took over abandoned tenement buildings and started hosting all-night parties, the city's mayor Enrique Tierno Galv�n turned a blind-eye in a deliberate attempt to promote an España Moderna that would help decisively break from its Francoist past. Spaniards who had left the country to find work in the 1960s began to return home and brought with them their teenage kids who had imbibed the more relaxed cultures of France, Germany and Switzerland, while foreigners also started to rediscover El Foro (the modish nickname used at that time for Spain's capital city) and added to the eclectic mix. Madrid was pushing the limits on sexuality, drugs, gender and aesthetics and began spewing out a stream of punk and new wave-influenced music, modernistic inspired design and Warholesque films whose plots were thin but featured outrageous excess and mad characters. The newly liberated media also spread the news to other Spanish cities, notably Barcelona and Vigo.
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