FOR those who turned out yesterday in the pale autumn sunshine that lit up the Guadarrama mountains, northwest of Madrid, it was the most sacred day in the calendar.

Thousands of mourners, many wearing sunglasses and blue shirts reminiscent of the fascist uniform, travelled to the last resting place of General Francisco Franco for a mass marking the 29th anniversary of the Spanish dictator’s death.

Joined by Franco’s daughter, Carmen Franco Polo, the crowd watched as the shadow of a 500ft-high cross above his tomb lengthened across the sierra. Then they moved inside the cavernous basilica which Franco had carved for himself out of the sheer rock by political prisoners.

This annual reminder of its fascist past came at an uncomfortable moment for Spain, which found itself under scrutiny last week after a football friendly with England was marred by racist chants directed at the visiting black players.

Displays of the type seen on Wednesday at Real Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium sit uneasily with Spain’s image as one of Europe’s most dynamic and progressive countries. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the socialist prime minister swept to power in March in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings, has championed liberal causes such as the legalisation of gay marriage.

The Spanish media and football authorities glossed over the incident at first, accusing their British counterparts of a witch-hunt. Some hinted the fuss was little more than an attempt to spoil Madrid’s hopes of beating London to host the 2012 Olympics. But as the week went on and Miguel Angel Moratinos, the foreign minister, apologised on behalf of the government, the mood changed.

The Spanish football federation must have known it was taking a risk by staging the first international in 10 years at Bernabeu. For years Real Madrid has been criticised for appearing to tolerate on its stands Ultra Sur, a band of neo-Nazi supporters only recently banned from waving the swastika flag. Its members are believed to have led the chanting.

It has emerged that a number of black footballers at Spanish clubs, such as Samuel Eto’o, Barcelona’s star striker from Cameroon, regularly suffer racist abuse during matches.

Although Eto’o has said he accepts praise and insults as a fact of football life, Momo Sissoko, 19, from Mali, a midfield player for Valencia, is having as bad a season as his club.

“They insult me every week in Spain,” Sissoko told Marca, a sports paper. “Things need to change. This happens every week at football grounds in Spain. The situation is serious.”

Spain has been struggling to assimilate an rise in the number of immigrants — increasingly from Africa — that has transformed it in less than 10 years from a largely homogeneous nation into a multicultural one. The infrastructure is struggling to cope. With unemployment at 10.5%, job prospects are not as rosy as the new arrivals hoped.

A clear alarm was sounded in El Ejido, a dusty provincial town near Almeria, southeast Spain, to which Moroccans and other immigrants flock to tend salad, vegetable and fruit crops grown under plastic sheeting. In February 2000 the worst race riots seen in Spain broke out after a mentally ill Moroccan killed a local woman.

Although there has been no repetition of such violence, experts say anecdotal evidence suggests racist attacks — though not recorded by police — have increased. The strain intensified after the Madrid train bombings by Islamic extremists that killed 191 on March 11. Last month 150 in Siguerlin de Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona, shouted insults outside a mosque during Ramadan.

There have also been claims that the police and judiciary are biased against minorities. A provincial court in Huelva, south-west Spain, this month absolved three men of killing a 60-year-old Moroccan at a bus station. In Madrid 50 people, mainly Africans, demonstrated after a Spanish nightclub bouncer was found not guilty of killing a 16-year-old Angolan.

Analysts warn against singling out Spaniards for criticism at a time when race relations in some European countries have been imperilled, apparently by surges in immigration coupled with heightened fears of Islamic terrorism.

The phenomenon was demonstrated by the backlash in Holland after the killing in Amsterdam this month of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker whose work outraged Muslims.

Paul Preston, a professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, said Spain was almost alone in Europe in not having a strong anti-immigrant party.

“A lot of Franco’s rhetoric was about evil foreigners and getting back to the quintessence of Spanishness and a lot of that has left some kind of legacy, especially among older people,” Preston said.

“Franco tried to keep alive the burning hatreds in Spain between victors and vanquished in the civil war. The irony is that a huge swathe of the population, probably 90%, completely reject violence and dictatorship. Spain remains a place of contradictions.”

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