I

The industrial diffusion of the motor vehicle had some significant macroeconomic effects before 1939 (on regional and national income, employment, exports, and productivity gains). Simultaneously, there was a whole range of microeconomic impacts, ranging from those on families to the creation of hundreds of goods and services companies for the growing fleet of vehicles in both developed and developing countries. Motor vehicles introduced economic and social changes and were influenced in turn by those changes.Footnote ¹⁷ They were present in many facets of life in developed countries, from industrial structures to daily life, including transport infrastructure, urban planning, architecture, factories, press and radio advertising, and, not least, travel and tourism.Footnote ¹⁸ They became essential for lifestyles and for the dominant model of development – so much so, that a General Motors magazine published in Spain in 1929 commented:

Ahead of the UK and Germany, France led world production and exports of the new means of transport when the twentieth century began. However, the factor endowment, the size of its market, and innovations in the organization of production, distribution, and sales phases soon enabled the United States and its automobile industry to reach an unassailable position. By 1913, the US already manufactured 79 per cent of the vehicles that were developed by the six leading producer countries. In 1928, when US production exceeded 4.5 million cars, nearly ten times more than in 1913, that world share rose to 85 per cent. Before the crisis of 1929, the automotive industry belonged to North America, as Canada had climbed to second place in the international ranking (Table 1).

Table 1 Vehicle production in the six leading countries (and Spain), 1900–28

Sources: Simon P. Ville, Transport and development of the European economy, 1750–1918 (London, 1990), p. 180. For 1928, see Catalán, ‘La creación de la ventaja comparativa’, p. 115.

Within this context, the case of Spain allows us to observe a key element: in order to experience these incipient processes, it was not necessary to be a leading country in motor vehicle production. What is more, Spain was a very long way behind the main world automobile producers. It only produced 325 vehicles in 1928, a figure that placed this country in fifteenth position in the world ranking.Footnote ²⁰ During this period, the production capacity of the main Spanish factories, such as the Hispano-Suiza one located in Barcelona, was constantly underutilized. Thus, instead of gearing itself towards mass production, the industry continued to opt exclusively for a luxury good, at a time when other trends could already be seen in the leading countries. The size of the domestic market, quite modest in the Spanish case, was one of the underlying causes. Another was the existence of a variety of small companies, which moreover produced several models; this obviously prevented the large-scale production that would lower prices. In 1929, the automobile entrepreneur André Citroën was of the opinion that businessmen in a country would only be in a position to produce cars with ‘sales prices that can compete with foreigners’ when that country reached the threshold of an annual consumption of 20,000 vehicles, and, even then, with difficulty. According to Citroën, Spain and Sweden were among the countries where ‘they could manufacture cars, find materials, recruit personnel and train the (technical) personnel’ for this, but as the former ‘does not have more than 130,000 cars and the latter 108,000, there is no doubt that the production of 20,000 cars mentioned above, apportioned among several industrialists and various models, would be difficult to achieve’.Footnote ²¹

Importance in terms of production was reflected almost directly in the ranking of consumers, although with some exceptions such as Spain, which was a notable consumer but a rather insignificant producer (Table 2). In 1913, the United States and Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, led the world ranking of vehicles per capita. The figures for 1921 and 1932 show that their motorization was already extraordinary, and it further accelerated over the course of the 1920s and ’30s: in the United States there was one car for every 11 people in 1921 and one for every 6 in 1932. Canada experienced a similar progression, since in 1921 there was one car for every 21 people but by 1932 this had risen to one car for every 10 people.Footnote ²² Vehicle use was now democratized in these countries. While in France the ‘vulgarisation de ce nouveau mode de transport’ was taking place in the interwar period, the case in the UK was that ‘the middle classes take to the road’: in 1921, there was one private car for every 164 people in France and one for every 114 in the United Kingdom, ratios that had reached one vehicle per 33 and 44 inhabitants, respectively, by 1932. As M. L. Monginet observed in 1933, ‘the prodigious development of the automobile industry in all countries of the world has only taken approximately a dozen years. Formerly, luxury vehicles were reserved for a few privileged rich; nowadays, the automobile is available to all social classes.’Footnote ²³

Table 2 Motor vehicles registered in the six leading producer countries (and Spain), 1907–32^a

^a These figures refer to private vehicles. The Spanish data include the vehicles registered (cumulatively) in each year from 1906. The figures for Spain also include motorcycles, which accounted for around 7 per cent of the total number of vehicles registered, according to José Luis Hernández Marco, ‘La oferta automovilística en España antes del Seat 600: 1906–1957’, Economía Industrial, 307 (1996), pp. 131–48.

Source: Ville, Transport, p. 192. Data for vehicles registered in Spain from ‘Primeros vehículos matriculados en España’, Archivo del Ministerio del Interior, Madrid, Dirección General de Tráfico.

Despite the relative backwardness of the Spanish automotive industry in this period, the country had already joined the process of mass consumption of this item, at levels similar to other countries that were more advanced in terms of per capita income (Table 3). This growing domestic demand was mainly met with imported vehicles, to the extent that, in 1931, for example, the consumption of vehicles of national production did not even reach 2 per cent of total consumption.Footnote ²⁴ Spain, therefore, was a consumer but not a producer of vehicles during the first decades of the twentieth century. Patterns of consumption were similar to those described for the leading countries. The advance was most spectacular after the First World War, when a kind of euphoria of consumption and use of motor cars can be observed, which can partly be explained by the extraordinary profits generated in the short and medium term by Spain's neutrality in this war. During the 1920s and 1930s, Spain was among the top ten countries when ranked by the number of vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants.

Table 3 Vehicles in use per 1,000 people, 1914–30

Source: José L. Hernández Marco, ‘Was it different in Spain? Automobile diffusion before Spanish Civil War’, n.d., https://www.academia.edu/32718665/Was_it_different_in_Spain_Automobile_diffusion_before_the_Spanish_Civil_War.

There were several reasons for the popularization of the motor car in the leading producer countries up to 1939. The productivity gain derived from large-scale production was, of course, one of them, along with the introduction of assembly lines and the spread of mass distribution techniques, which, as Alfred D. Chandler explained, were not available for all industries and were not equally important in all of them.Footnote ²⁵ Assembly-line production quickly increased productivity in factories and reduced prices, which facilitated the social diffusion of cars. A Ford Model T cost $825 in 1908; only eight years later, in 1916, this had dropped to $345. As prices continued to fall in the following years, there was an explosion in demand stimulated by marketing techniques such as consumer credits, instalment sales, and the creation of a notable second-hand market. Competition between companies led them to adopt progressive changes in their strategic models, and wage levels also contributed to this explosion. In the 1920s and particularly the 1930s, spurred by the international crisis, companies tended to manufacture smaller cars – known in the UK as ‘baby’ cars – which were accessible to more people. In the US, the relationship between a worker's wage and the price of a car was more advantageous than in other countries. According to Citroën, the price of a car in 1929 was equivalent to 60 days’ work in the US, while in France it corresponded to 300–400 days.Footnote ²⁶

After the First World War, European companies were aware of these differences. Taking into account US multinational expansion (which included the installation of assembly factories and the absorption of local companies), they chose to manufacture competitive models by reducing their prices. Each country responded differently. In France, from 1919, Citroën launched the first European vehicle aimed at the mass market, the Type A Torpedo, which was followed by, among others, the C6 (1929), the Citroën Rosalie (1932), and the 7CV (1934). The UK made a start in this race with the small Austin 7 (1921–37), followed by its rival, the Morris Minor (1929), restyled in 1931 and the first car to cost as little as £100. This and other models such as the Austin 7 Tourer, which sold for £125–£140 and had female drivers among its target customers, made vehicles available to thousands of families. During the 1930s, the number of private cars in the UK doubled from one to two million on the eve of the Second World War, and licences for private vehicles, including motorcycles, rose from 1.76 million in 1930 to 2.40 million in 1938.Footnote ²⁷

We can see similar processes in Germany and Italy. In the former, Opel launched the 4/12 PS Laubfrosch model in 1924 and the P-4 in 1934–5, while BMW began producing vehicles in 1927 with the BMW-Dixi, and DKW made its debut in 1928 with the Typ P. These initiatives were the basis for mass motorization in Germany, which was considered strategic to the Third Reich's economic recovery before 1935. Such mass consumption was also pursued in Italy, culminating in 1935 when Fiat marketed its famous Topolino model. This commitment to creating a mass consumption society in Germany and Italy led to great progress being made, with the relatively low ratios of 1.43 and 1.30 cars per 1,000 people, respectively, in 1921, rising considerably to 7.57 and 5.61 cars per 1,000 people in 1932, in line with the figures observed for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.Footnote ²⁸ In a somewhat more modest position, Spain also experienced this extraordinary motorization. According to official figures, in 1922 there were 1.7 cars per 1,000 people, a ratio that rose to 8.1 in 1930 (Table 3). These data show that the relative position of Spain was better than that of other countries in the European periphery such as Italy.

As well as other durable consumer goods that were arriving in stores (refrigerators, electric irons and cookers, vacuum cleaners, etc.), thousands of families in the most developed economies started buying cars in the 1920s and 1930s (in fact, these were already millions in the United States, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom). Thus, a significant part of the family income was absorbed by the cost of purchasing and maintaining motor vehicles.Footnote ²⁹ The change in the patterns of consumption of durable goods in Spain was less intense than in the more developed countries, but the trends were similar. In 1926, for example, the company Puig y Cía. de Barcelona offered ‘Totally automatic electric refrigeration units, of the Frigidaire brand, suitable for domestic and commercial use’. This market expanded in the 1930s with brands such as Baker, Remington, Electrolux, and Norge, which sold ‘refrigeration chambers, electric washing machines, air conditioners, electric cookers’.Footnote ³⁰ At the same time, ‘two-year’ hire-purchase agreements appeared for radio sets made by Bremer-Tully, Philips, Telefunken, Clarion, Crosley, and Punto Azul, among others.Footnote ³¹

The data available on the pattern of consumption of Spanish families, although statistically fragile, show that the country underwent a certain modernization between 1900 and 1936: the weight of ‘foodstuffs’ fell by 6 per cent, while the following items all increased: ‘clothing and footwear’, ‘housing and household expenditure’ (which included durable consumer goods), and ‘other expenses’ (including leisure). The real per capita consumption of Spaniards in 1935 was 42 per cent greater than in 1900.Footnote ³² Just as, from the 1920s, there was an ‘irruption of modernity’ in the Spanish urban fabric, ‘mass society’ emerged and the most visible expression of this ‘great transformation experienced by urban society’ was the combination of electricity, the telephone, the cinematograph, the press, the radio, advertising, sport, fashion, the motor car, and tourism.Footnote ³³ Although only 42 per cent of the population lived in municipalities of more than 10,000 inhabitants in 1930, the large cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants became increasingly prominent and led the way in establishing the dynamics of Spanish society between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War. This sociological mutation – in which the urban middle classes participated, even though their power and influence were far lower than those of their counterparts in the leading countries – ran parallel to the convergence of per capita income with developed Europe during the interwar period.Footnote ³⁴

II

The spread of motor vehicles was, as seen above, extraordinarily dynamic and required both provisions on transport policy and adaptation processes in terms of infrastructures and rules. It was necessary to regulate the registration of vehicles, codify traffic regulations, and adapt existing roads to a new means of transport which was faster and more invasive. The car, while providing a solution to some previous problems, generated others of a new nature. Organic pollution caused by horses in big cities, which disappeared as these animals were superseded by cars, was replaced by new types of contamination such as noise pollution, road congestion, and petrol fumes, which added new harmful emissions to the atmosphere on top of those coming from factories and domestic coal consumption.Footnote ³⁵ A new ‘disease’ also broke out with the car: traffic accidents, which escalated to become a serious twentieth-century epidemic. There were numerous consequences of the diffusion of motor vehicles and these tended to be very similar in all countries where the new means of transport proliferated rapidly, without excessive time lags, in line with a more integrated market and world. It seems clear that the motor vehicle was one of the signs of globalization during the second industrial revolution.

During the interwar period, the motor vehicle, with its invasive capacity, made changes to the existing road system inevitable. It was imperative to widen old roads, modify their camber and the radius of curvature, modernize or strengthen road surfaces, prepare crossings and crossroads, and, in general, extend the boundaries of road networks. Likewise, it was necessary to rethink territorial and urban planning, which was being instigated at this time, in line with the new type of roads necessary to accommodate the new ‘mechanical speeds’ and the dizzying modification of travel times and accessibility.Footnote ³⁶ During the nineteenth century, the road network became subordinated to the railway network all over the world. However, before the Second World War, the tables had turned in favour of motor vehicles with roads taking precedence over railways. This led to what contemporaries, in Spain and more widely in Europe, called the ‘railway problem’.Footnote ³⁷

As the 1920s progressed and regular and discretionary road transport lines expanded at the same rate as, or even at a greater pace than, private vehicles, competition became a problem. This gave rise to policies to help rail transport, in line with demands from powerful railway operators who fought defensively in every country. However, their attempts were futile because motor vehicles finally won the race. Coaches, buses, and private cars were more flexible and became cheaper, finally replacing rail travel, at least for short- and medium-distance trips. In Spain, the use of motor vehicles, both for the commercial transport of goods and for travellers, became more indispensable than in other countries, due to the low density of railway networks and their comparative shortcomings (slowness, comfort, interconnection, etc.).Footnote ³⁸ Generally speaking, both in Spain and in other countries, the car generated collective enthusiasm and, as remarked on the occasion of the great 1929 Paris Motor Show, it was perceived as an ‘index of liberation’:

This account mentions three phenomena where the car was already involved: the emergence of tourism as an international economic phenomenon; the promotion of tourism consumption through ‘insinuating calls’; and the vehicle as an instrument for satisfying the new wants and desires that the emerging mass-consumption society was generating. Vehicle companies’ advertisements and the specialized press both placed the emphasis on the car–freedom equation.Footnote ⁴⁰

A phenomenon of transnational mobility such as tourism required infrastructures that were articulated at an international level (international circuits), as well as an improvement of national road networks and a proper hierarchical organization in order to facilitate the movement of goods and travellers, given the fact that tourist mobility was a progressive factor from 1920 onwards.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1926, Spain approved the National Tourism Circuit, a plan to develop an improved road network in response to ‘the great national interest in promoting tourism’, carried out by a special body called the Patronato Nacional de Firmes Especiales.Footnote ⁴² Following the Spanish model, Portugal founded its Junta Autónoma de Estradas in 1927 and drew up a highway code and road plan in 1928, which was redefined in 1933 in order to improve car traffic conditions and connections with Spain, and to equip itself with national roads that guaranteed communications between commercial, industrial, agricultural, and tourism centres and ports and railway stations.Footnote ⁴³ On 17 May 1928, Mussolini's Italy established its national road board, the Ente Nazionale per le Strade, which, like its state railways, Ferrovie dello Stato, was autonomous, and whose aim was to develop a comprehensive programme for reordering and improving Italian roads. In 1926, the fascist regime approved a highways (major roads) plan, a pioneer initiative in Europe. France had already considered the possibility of building highways in 1921, but its progress was very slow compared to the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler's Germany, which had built around 7,000 km of these roads by 1938 (Table 4). Spain also participated directly in the European debate on ‘special roads reserved for motor vehicles’, which was inaugurated in the important fifth International Road Congress, held in Milan in 1926, and where the delegations of Italy, the United States, France, and the UK had a prominent role.Footnote ⁴⁴

Table 4 Highway networks in Germany, Italy, and France, 1938

Source: Claude Leveillé-Nizerolle, Le tourisme dans l’économie contemporaine (Paris, 1938), pp. 77–8.

The development of roads in those years was not only motivated by tourism, but tourism as a motivation did gain an international presence. This was due to the proliferation of requests arising from the rise of motor vehicle and other forms of tourism. A summary published in a 1931 report from the US Department of Commerce entitled ‘Promotion of tourist travel by foreign countries’ clearly showed the large group of countries where tourism was a factor of great economic importance. This phenomenon was perceived in the traditional tourism countries (Switzerland, Italy, and France) but also in others that in the early 1930s were considered as emerging tourism countries, such as Spain.Footnote ⁴⁵ For this reason, a substantial outlay on advertising abroad was justifiable: nineteen countries in Europe (including Spain), six in the Americas, and eight on other continents invested large amounts of money in keeping tourist offices open in the USA to attract tourists from that country.Footnote ⁴⁶ During these years, international organizations (mainly the League of Nations), states, regional administrations, and their respective public or private tourism organizations were more active than ever before and adopted three key measures in relation to tourism and road transport.

The first was the creation of major international routes that were solely for motor vehicles (highways), linked to national road networks which connected the main traffic centres quickly and safely. In this regard, the Geneva Congress of 1931, organized by the International Association of Recognised Automobile Clubs, should be mentioned. Four major international routes were established, mainly on the basis of a project devised by Piero Puricelli, spreading a 37,176-kilometre network of highways throughout Europe ‘for the greatest benefit of international tourism’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The second measure was the construction of ‘purely tourist routes’ within each country, in order to reach attractive regions with poor access. France was one of the pioneer countries even before the First World War. Its first route touristique was opened in 1903 in Corniche de l'Esterel and put an isolated but charming region, which was not previously very accessible, on the map. The most important route, however, was located in the Alps and was almost finished in 1937 (after which construction was interrupted by the Second World War). Lake routes were the main attraction in Italy, particularly Lake Garda (the Gardesana) and another through the Dolomites, specially adapted for car traffic. Spain also promoted tourist routes as a state project from 1926. These are just a few examples. The car could reach places where trains could not, thereby expanding the geographical limits of tourism. This also stimulated the desire to visit destinations that those seeking to discover new ‘sights’ pointed out in road maps, tourist guides, or the pages of newspapers dedicated to tourism, which proliferated in Spain from the mid-1920s.Footnote ⁴⁸

Third, the international spread of motor vehicles put the regulation of cross-border travel, and the need to simplify documents, requirements, and fees, on political agendas. In this regard, movement had enormous potential. In the interwar period, international travel was largely based on two factors: the recognition of the economic importance of tourism, and its value as a factor of harmony and understanding between nations (tourism diplomacy). The League of Nations was very active in this respect. It recommended simplifying border formalities, reducing or abolishing visa fees, and issuing international driving licences and carnets de passage en douanes (customs passes) for passenger vehicles, thus stimulating tourism. In 1929, around thirty countries authorized the American Automobile Association to issue these documents for American tourists, proof of the importance that car tourism had gained within global tourism.Footnote ⁴⁹

Thanks to the expansion of motor vehicles in the first third of the twentieth century, and more precisely after the First World War, travel became a real industry – among other reasons because ‘commercial transport’ (which increased comfort, speed, and safety) was developed at this time.Footnote ⁵⁰ Transport had traditionally absorbed much of the time and cost of a holiday or tourist trip. Now, the speed of new means of transport and the fall in prices reduced both factors, and brought territories and nations closer together. By the late 1920s, the structure of trips and excursions had visibly changed in international travel. The importance of rail travel had diminished in favour of the car, and air travel was beginning to attract attention. American, Canadian, and Italian tourism statistics from these years reflected the relative importance of the various means of transport. Italian statistics are particularly illustrative in this regard as they show the clear progression of motor vehicle tourism: while in 1931 over half of foreign tourists to Italy travelled by motor vehicle, just three years later that proportion had risen to more than two-thirds. Cross-border tourism between Canada and the United States was even more successful, as could be expected for two countries with a high degree of motorization. In 1926, Canadian visitors entering the United States by road already accounted for 68 per cent of the total, and in the early 1930s this figure rose to 83–4 per cent. Tourists visiting Canada were even more reliant on the car. In 1925, 82 per cent of foreign tourists already used this form of transport, and by 1933 this figure had risen to 92 per cent. The car had taken control of incoming tourism in North America. It was entirely logical, given that the United States and Canada led world car production in 1928, and occupied the top two positions in the world ranking of vehicles per 1,000 people (200 and 125, respectively) in 1930.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, collective road transport also helped replace the forms of transport that had previously been used for certain local routes or routes of particular tourist interest. A good example can be found in the route joining Warwick and the famous spa town of Leamington Spa (3 miles), where in 1905 the electric tram replaced the horse tram that had been introduced in 1881, and then in 1930 the motor bus definitively replaced the tram.Footnote ⁵² A guide to Leamington Spa provided the key: the Midland Red bus company (RED Way) offered more frequent trips with greater flexibility to many of the towns and cities in this area of the Midlands, and fares were also cheaper, since passengers could buy a ticket for one day for all West Midland locations connected by the company.Footnote ⁵³ This example provides a glimpse of how roads and motor vehicles won the fight against railways in the United Kingdom and throughout continental Europe.

III

The recent historiography on tourism in Spain makes it possible to verify how the cycles of tourism in the country during the first decades of the twentieth century were similar to those of other developed countries.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, the available figures for inbound tourism show Spain as an emerging country in international tourism: it occupied thirteenth place for foreign tourism revenue in 1931, and had risen to eleventh by 1933.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the first decades of the twentieth century, tourism became a key sector in Spain both as a means to improve the country's image and because of its capacity to generate positive spillover effects in local economies and, in general, boost the country's modernization. Within this context, tourism was perceived as progress and the state had the obligation to defend it by means of an active tourism policy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Notable among several initiatives was the creation of an institution called the Comisaría Regia del Turismo y de la Cultura Artística (1911–28) and later the foundation of the National Tourism Board (Patronato Nacional de Turismo) in 1928. The former concentrated on cultural activities and more folkloric aspects of the country, although there was no real connection between tourism bodies and the tourism sector itself. The latter incorporated tourism into the state's agenda of priorities and had the backing of the influential business lobby. In this respect, attention should also be drawn to the National Tourism Board's role in promoting important public works in transport and communications and encouraging the building of hotels with state aid.Footnote ⁵⁷ All these factors were key elements in developing the sector. Overall, what was being developed during this period was a strategy of tourism policy supported by two pillars: constructing the basic traits of touristic Spain and selling this image abroad.

The arrival of the Second Republic (1931–6) led to a restructuring of the monarchic National Tourism Board, after subjecting it to a severe political and financial audit.Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the main strategic novelties was making it possible to spread the profits from tourism to the middle and working poorer classes, in stark contrast to the previous body, which had exhibited a more aristocratic and elitist vision. The Republican National Tourism Board also tried to improve Spain's image abroad in order to attract new visitors from other countries. Nevertheless, inadequate funding at a time of budgetary savings, a lack of internal government stability, and the difficult international context after the impact of the Great Depression hindered this task.Footnote ⁵⁹

However, tourism is only partly the result of tourism policy. Hence, despite the limitations of tourism policies seen above, new forms of mobility during this period implied not only quantitative but also qualitative changes. The mode of travel, the tourism experience, destinations, and attractions all evolved considerably. This was not only true for individuals; the tourism industry was also transformed, as were the forms of tourism this sector promoted. Moreover, the structure of international travel was revolutionized. In Spain, from 1919, when the country's first commercial flight took place, all the means of transport that characterize the modernity of the twentieth century were present: trains, trams, steamships, aeroplanes, and motor vehicles, both private and collective.Footnote ⁶⁰ This combination of means of transport led to both general and tourist mobility within the country being more intense and more diversified, aided by the proliferation of telephone communications.Footnote ⁶¹

Within this process, it should be noted that motorized road transport brought about a swift transformation in the behaviour of tourists, while it also became the backbone of a society that promoted consumption, and it was effectively a link to new lifestyles.Footnote ⁶² The advance of road mobility was very rapid. Hence, while in 1910 there were only 0.2 motor vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants, by 1935, just in the category of passenger vehicles, there were now 5.7 per 1,000 inhabitants. Overall, in 1935 there were almost 200,000 motor vehicles in use, distributed as shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Motor vehicles in use on Spanish roads, 1935

Source: Ministerio de Hacienda, Dirección General de Rentas Públicas, Estadística del impuesto de la patente nacional de circulación de automóviles. Año 1935 (Madrid, 1936). The value for buses is an estimate for the years 1930–3 from José L. Hernández Marco, ‘Las primeras reacciones de las compañías ferroviarias españolas al inicio de la competencia automovilística antes de la Guerra Civil’, Revista de Historia Económica, 2 (2002), pp. 335–63, at p. 350 (taking the mean figure for those years).

In this vehicle population, private cars accounted for almost 55 per cent of this total and, in general, passenger transport vehicles, both private and in public service, accounted for more than three-quarters of the total. We do not have figures for the total number of people who travelled in all of these vehicles. Figures available for the main collective means of land transport in 1934 register 929 million passengers: that is, thirty-eight trips per inhabitant, given a population of 23.4 million (Table 6). It can be seen that local, urban, and metropolitan forms of transport (trams and trolleybuses), moved roughly three-quarters of travellers, followed by trains and buses. Buses (including coaches), a comparatively cheap means of transport, carried 58 million passengers in 1934 – rather more than half the number of train passengers.Footnote ⁶³

Table 6 Structure of land transport collective travel in Spain, 1934

Source: Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell, eds., Estadísticas históricas de España siglos XIX y XX (Bilbao, 2005), p. 557.

During the interwar period there were two basic forms of motor vehicle tourism in Spain. One group was based on car drivers who owned their own vehicles. The other, more numerous, group comprised the users of collective vehicles for tourism purposes, usually travelling in groups. The former grew to significant numbers, although continuing to be of a somewhat elitist nature, while the latter served as a channel to extend these practices to a wider public.

Motor vehicle tourism by private car was not restricted to national tourists. There were also foreign tourists arriving by car. Unlike in the cases of Italy, the United States, or Canada, the official statistics available in Spain for 1929–34, from the National Tourism Board, are not at all clear. They do not show the means of access of foreign tourism, as this is classified as ‘they entered by crossing the border’, at times via locations where there was both road and rail access. The most reliable data available – although not complete – come from the statistics of ‘Foreign vehicles that have been issued a receipt for the acquisition of an international tourist licence’ to enter the country.Footnote ⁶⁴ There were a total of 26,662 private passenger vehicles in 1929, and 41,760 in 1932; we estimate that there could have been approximately 44,700 in 1934, which was the equivalent of 45 per cent of all the private cars then registered in Spain. These figures include day trippers and tourists (those who are away for more than 24 hours), although it is not possible to clearly distinguish one from the other. A singular phenomenon of this tourism was that of ‘caravans’: that is, motorists who travelled in groups, following the same route, usually organized by an automobile club or tourism association, on the occasion of some international event, whether trials related to the ‘international automobile circuit’ or congresses, such as the International Railway Congress held in Madrid in 1930.Footnote ⁶⁵

On the other hand, group travel by bus and coach was a key element in the social diffusion of road travel in Spain, helping this pervade increasingly broad sectors of society. This process was given a great boost by regular bus lines, which expanded and spread rapidly, occasional organized trips, and also group journeys organized systematically, on an industrial scale, by bus companies or travel agencies, as excursions, including the more elitist trips of gran turismo (grand tourism).Footnote ⁶⁶

The coach increased the possibilities of travelling, both territorially and socially, giving rise to several facets or forms of travel: mountain and nature tourism, urban and cultural tourism, and religious tourism, both inside and outside Spain. During the interwar period, this type of travel received the name ‘excursion’. In fact, there was a kind of excursion fever at this time that led to the diffusion, in the main Spanish cities, of small associations of active tourism, cyclists, hikers and ramblers, archaeological societies, and the like.

Within the road passenger transport market, two types of operators were active after the regulations passed in 1924: those that had a licence to run regular lines of passenger transport (buses and coaches) on an exclusive basis; and ‘free’ transport undertakings: ‘taxi drivers, buses and coaches for excursions, and lorries for goods without a fixed route’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Within the first group, there were 2,444 lines of ‘authorized public services of motor vehicles’ in 1933, covering a total distance of almost 100,000 kilometres.Footnote ⁶⁸ For these regular bus and coach lines, tourist travel was only a fraction of their business, and difficult to quantify, but this service was fundamental to access all corners of the country. In 1935, ‘Spain certainly does not have a very large number of kilometres of railways’; however, it did have an extensive system of inter-urban road communications. Via this network, a substantial number of bus companies ‘provide their services with coaches of the world's best makes, unbeatable in terms of comfort and safety, with extremely attractive timetables and prices’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In general, in the provinces where the density of railways was lower, the density of regular services of road passenger transport was greater.Footnote ⁷⁰ The information on these services was summarized in a guide issued by the National Tourism Board, the first edition of which appeared in 1929.

With regard to the second group of operators, the small business entrepreneurs with ‘buses and coaches for excursions’ (that is, specifically for tourism use), we do not know their number, but we do know that their advertising flourished from the mid-1920s. These advertisements show how road passenger transport for tourist trips in Spain ‘became an authentic industry’, with a diversity of products and targeting all types of people, especially the ‘modest classes’ in the 1930s.Footnote ⁷¹ As well as this segment of tourist buses and coaches, some travel agencies, such as Thomas Cook or Marsans, and some associations involved in tourism, also acquired coaches.Footnote ⁷² In short, in Spain in the 1930s, as in many other European countries, the roads were now a significant part of the ‘vital network throughout which tourists circulate’.Footnote ⁷³

IV

The development of motor vehicles during the first decades of the twentieth century and their mass production and consumption had significant economic and social effects. The developed Atlantic countries, world leaders in vehicle production, were the protagonists of this success of the car. However, the globalization brought about by the second industrial revolution drew in other countries on the periphery through the use of transport technologies, telecommunications, and the mass media (the illustrated press, radio, and cinema). Over and beyond the degree of development, the consumption patterns and lifestyles of the ‘centres’ and the ‘peripheries’ tended to become more uniform, especially among the urban population. During the interwar period, this included an interest in travelling and leisure activities in general.

This article has shown how the expansion of the use of the motor vehicle in Spain during the period under study helped bring new habits of consumption and tourism practices to the country, similar to other countries considered to be more developed in terms of GDP per capita. Spain participated in this expansion despite not being a significant producer of automobiles, in contrast to several more advanced countries at this time. The private automobile, that is, the passenger car, which is called a turismo in Spain, and collective motor vehicles revolutionized mobility during the first third of the twentieth century, as pleasure trips became available to increasingly broad sectors of society. In this way, the foundations were laid for new forms of behaviour in an incipient tourism industry, which barely two decades later would be a key element in the country's production structure.

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset explained this well in The revolt of the masses (La rebelión de las masas, 1930), which was widely disseminated in Europe in the 1930s. He affirmed that the rebellion of the masses ‘comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement’ and that ‘the life of the ordinary man is today made up of the same vital repertory which before characterized only the superior minorities’. He went on to conclude that ‘there is hardly a place on the continent where strictly the same does not happen’, a trend that he identified as the ‘frightful homogeneity of situations into which the entire West is sinking’.Footnote ⁷⁴

This technical, cultural, and socio-economic confluence, apart from the obvious national differences, ultimately explains how some of the countries of the European periphery that had not developed an automotive industry soon joined the mass consumption of the automobile and adopted the social uses implicit therein, including tourist trips (a good indicator of the process). Spain is an excellent example from this group of countries.

Here in Spain, the development of the car set in motion ‘touring’, a form of car tourism that reduced the length of stays and shortened the time between the point of departure and the destination. It also fragmented the time for leisure travel into short trips, opened up a variety of new routes, and enabled trips to unknown places or to areas that were hard to reach by rail or other traditional means of transport. These activities were, of course, initially carried out by the elites. However, during the interwar period, they gradually became accessible to wider social groupings due to the spectacular progress of means of collective transport (buses and coaches). This evolution included trips organized by travel agencies, self-organized trips by regional groups travelling to their province of origin during the summer, educational trips, trips for youth groups or young people from political parties, and trips arranged by work centres or trade union organizations. These new patterns of tourist mobility, barely studied from this perspective, were part of a broader process of modernization of Spanish society, visible in the dynamism of its cities. When we take a closer look at these, we can confirm that this peripheral country, despite its relative degree of economic backwardness, was joining the mass consumption society, in which the motor vehicle would take on an increasingly important role.