Every picture reminds you of a story: and here's one of the then editor of this paper (me) standing in front of some printing presses with other editors from all over Europe. The presses belong to El País in Madrid. The editors flew in because the newspaper asked them to do so. Come and help us defend our independence (at a time, not three decades ago, when berserk Franco colonels were staging florid, failed coups). So there we line up, heavy metal at our backs, implicitly saying that Spain is part of the wider world now. Get your guns out of parliament and your sticky fingers out of the printers' ink.
Yesterday, that worldly Spain voted again, a normal, accustomed event, but still one, repeated 10 times since the Generalissimo departed, to ponder. Thanks, but no thanks to George Bush, we've grown a little leery over the alleged wonder of exported democracy. It hasn't exactly transformed Kabul or Baghdad. China wins economic growth records without even acknowledging its existence. Russians vote massively for the phoney freedom of Putinism. There's nothing apparently magical about a ballot box any longer.
But there was still an edge of danger and defiance to the Spanish experience as Jose Luis Zapatero and his Socialists swept back into power last night. A terrorist murder stopped the campaigning. Merely turning out to vote meant risking the wrath of a group like Eta. And the routine issues down below should resonate in weary Britain, too.
Take an economy going off the boil after happy years of buoyant growth. Take a nation increasingly obsessed with maintaining its own identity as powerful provinces that want to be nations themselves push for ever greater autonomy. Take a building boom going bust, banks wobbling, sub-prime sites lying idle. Take the threat of killing within and mass murder as Islam's extremists get on a train. Take a monarchy under strain. Take an immigration rate that far outstrips the UK's: half a million Moroccans, hundreds of thousands of Colombians, Paraguayans, Ecuadorians, Romanians - and never forgetting, on some estimates, almost a million Brits.
This isn't a country that exists and struggles far away, remote from our concerns. On the contrary, in many urgent ways, it is the country that feels it is closest to the British condition. Spain's TV news covered Belfast and Armagh on a daily basis. Camilla and Charlie and the ghost of Di haunt Spanish magazine stands. Airport expansion? The Spanish own our biggest runways. Olympics? Been there, done that. Giscard's treaty? Ratified.
Perhaps we haven't started to ask ourselves the sharpest questions about national breakup yet, but we should: why else did the SNP keep sending delegations to Catalonia? And as for the worst problem of the lot - the problem of what happens when millions of immigrants who arrived to find jobs discover that those jobs are ceasing to exist, that's a crisis for Málaga and Manchester to struggle with in equal measure.
Spain ought to be, and often is, our greatest ally inside the EU. Its performance in that Europe has seen a stagnant economy burst into the G8 league. Its language and ambition is worldwide. But we don't, as the Spanish do, ever pause to consider the reasons for what's happened since Colonel Tejero waved his pistol in the Cortes 27 years ago.
Simply: that wider world makes huddled isolation impossible any longer. Spain has needed Nato to keep its officer corps out of politics, and to embrace the EU to act as great guarantor of its freedom (and of the impossibility of falling back).
But Spain doesn't know, just as Britain doesn't know, where the next explosive pressures will come. It doesn't feel safe, as we too blandly feel safe. It remembers old turmoil - and tries to forget. It shows what the zest of freedom can deliver. It showed yesterday that democratic Socialism with liberal imagination can still trump the narrow conservative nationalism of fear and restriction.
And (to hell with the Wyoming caucuses!) it is also at the heart of our own debate about Europe and identity. We're in this together, if only we have the wit to realise it. Democracy in the right soil can change everything. Yellowed pictures of editors past tell a story that's always fresh.
Peter Preston