Recent developments in social and cultural geography in Spain

As recently as 1993, Carmen Bel questioned whether Spain had even minimal development in the field of social geography: despite the fact that certain authors (for ideological reasons) and texts (due to their conceptual focus) demonstrated a concern for social phenomena, a social vision of the complete range of topics related to human geography has never materialized in Spain. Nor has social geography ever been understood as a potential driver of epistemological change in human geography, reorientating human geography’s underpinnings as with the cultural turn in Anglo-American geography, for example. It would be a lengthy, complex task to explain the historical reasons for this situation, but they can be summarized by the strong, decisive influence of Vidalian regional geography and, above all, by the intellectual isolation imposed by the Franco regime, leading to a rejection of any subject or focus deviating from official programmes. For years, Spanish academic geography, isolated from outside influences, was limited to exploring only certain topics and was deprived of any methodological development and critical approach. As such, Spanish geography became an essentially descriptive, apolitical discipline in which its social component and public relevance was highly restricted. This position started to change at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, when several young university professors began to explore radical trends developing in the Englishspeaking world. These new ideas, combined with anti-Franco political restlessness and concerns about urban, social problems created new social awareness within some circles of Spanish geography. Although this was not translated directly into studies of social geography, it did underlie the development of a so-called radical or Marxist geography. Yet in contrast to French geography, in Spain no leading figure emerged to catalyse a new social geography or diffuse this approach among proponents of the predominant Vidalian geography. This does not mean that there have been no studies or publications that could be classified as social geography. However, their authors almost never identify their works as social geography in contrast to different subject branches (population geography, urban geography, etc.) or conceptual branches (geographical thought, qualitative methodologies, etc.). The situation vis-a`-vis cultural geography is more limited, to which not a single reflection or elegy has been devoted.