Rosa Montero
Journalist

The El País journalist Rosa Montero talks about her career during one of Spain's most turbulent periods and how she charmed the fascists. To be a journalist 30 years ago in Spain was to be right on the spot for one of the biggest stories in its history, and Rosa Montero was there, finding her voice as part of the progressive movement of the 1970s. "During Franco's regime there was a kind of dictated public language and dialogue that people couldn't get away from," she remembers. "When I started out as a young journalist in 1969 I felt a real need to go back and use words that had some kind of real meaning for daily life".

To support herself she freelanced for a number of magazines and newspapers in her home town of Madrid, taking whatever job came her way. "In 1969 it wasn't uncommon to have doors closed to you because there were many, many places then that simply and legally refused to hire women. So you held on to whatever writing job you could get. They paid us a mere pittance and we worked hard for every peseta we earned. But two duros [five-peseta coins] went a long way in our uncouth and simple lifestyles," she adds, laughing.

The newspaper El País was launched in May 1976 and when the Sunday supplement followed towards the end of that year, Rosa's long-standing relationship with the national press began. "We always had the feeling that we were writing history," she says. "We were holding up this mirror to what was going on around us. They were brilliant and fascinating years. People writing for the paper became known very quickly and I was one of them. It makes me proud to be able to say I am a good journalist".