Spain's constitution, the one the country still runs on, never names a single one of its 17 comunidades autónomas. Not Cataluña, not Andalucía, none of them. These are basically Spain's equivalent of states, and when Spaniards voted on the text in December 1978, today's map did not exist yet. So where did they come from?
In this episode of Spain Explained, Marti Buckley dissects how a country that ran on 49/50 provinces for nearly a century and a half ended up with 17 regional governments that control hospitals, schools, language policy, and in three cases their own police forces. She covers the 1833 province grid the whole system was built from, the fast track that Cataluña, the Basque Country, and Galicia took because they had voted on self-government during the Second Republic, the Andalucían referendum that broke the two-tier model open, and the fiscal arrangement that lets the Basque Country and Navarra collect their own taxes and pay Madrid a negotiated sum. It is the foundation for a year of regional episodes to come.
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