Contesting the Nation’s Imaginary: A genealogy of <em>Spain is different</em>

This article reconstructs the genealogy of the slogan Spain is different, widely associated with Francoist tourism but rooted in Republican Spain’s 1932–1933 tourism campaign. Based on archival and visual sources, as well as national and foreign press, it examines how the slogan emerged within broader debates over national identity, exoticism, and modernity. Designed by Rafael Calleja, a Republican civil servant with conservative views, the campaign mobilized early branding strategies to market Spain’s distinctiveness while navigating deep ideological tensions within the Second Republic. Landscapes, monumental architecture, and folkloric imagery were employed to craft a unified national image for foreign audiences, even as the Republic faced domestic conflicts over secularism, gender roles, and modern reforms. The analysis situates Spain is different within long-standing cultural narratives that framed Spain’s difference both as backwardness (Leyenda Negra) and as an exotic attraction for tourism. It highlights how the slogan circulated internationally during the Spanish Civil War, often reframed in the Anglophone press as a trope to explain Spain’s perceived violence, orientalism, and otherness. Calleja’s role extended beyond the Republic: he remained at the helm of Spanish tourism until 1957, adapting the same imagery across regimes. His later works further codified Spanish uniqueness through nostalgic, orientalist, and imperial themes. By tracing the continuity of symbols, images, and narratives across the Republic and the Franco regime, this study challenges sharp divisions in Spain’s historiography. It shows how the Republican-era national imaginary laid groundwork that the dictatorship would appropriate, reshaping it into a more explicit discourse of national exceptionalism. Spain is different thus operated both as a marketing slogan and as a durable framework for representing and contesting Spanish identity across ideological shifts and political regimes.