So Regency, so Regency, my dear

The title is from a line in a John Betjeman poem about a nightclub. It always makes me think of red velvet and brocades and big casement windows and that, in turn, reminds me of some provincial hotels I knew in the UK and of some of the casinos we know locally. Once elegant, now faded. Once plump sofas, now with springs that poke you in the bottom. And the warped wood and chipped paint of those grand windows that no longer close quite properly. And a slight mustiness in the air.

Living in Culebrón, our two nearest, obvious casinos, the one in Monóvar and Novelda, are a bit like that. One welcomes non-members through its doors at all times; the other is still, generally, membership only. Others, like the very grand casino in Murcia, generate income as a tourist attraction—first the cathedral and then the casino. Lots, like the ones in Cartagena, Torrevieja, Alicante and Aspe, make their terrace bar available to the general public to generate income to keep the buildings open for their members. There are others that you may well know if you live here and ones you will see in passing if you visit. The buildings are often grand enough to be noteworthy.

The casinos were an "all of a sudden" phenomenon popping up in towns and cities all over Spain at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the name, casinos have nothing to do with gambling; in fact, gambling wasn't legalised in Spain till 1977. Instead, the casinos were private clubs built by associations of local businessmen as a social and cultural institution for their class. They were funded through membership and sustained by the broad economic activities and prosperity of their members. In effect, they were the response of the new money, of "self-made men," not being allowed access to the private salons of the "old money" social elite. I've seen figures that say by 1882 there were more than 1,500 registered casinos and nearly 2,000 by the turn of the century. Wherever people were making money, they built casinos.

The Spanish casinos were a variation on the English gentlemen’s club and the Italian cultural associations. Spanish casinos became bastions of exclusivity, accessible only to men of the right background—businessmen, landowners, professionals, and politicians—usually by invitation or sponsorship. They were conceived as “homes away from home,” outfitted with plush reading rooms, billiard halls, card tables, libraries, stages for concerts and theatre, and glittering ballrooms. They were a space for the nouveau riche to get together, to share ideas, to do deals, to avoid the constraints of the home and, at the same time, they offered a platform for new authors to showcase their work, for musicians to hone their skills and gain a reputation, and for many other artists to find an outlet or a sponsor for their work. They were a forum for spirited arguments over politics and economics, over new technologies and, in many provincial towns, the casino effectively functioned as a local parliament, where decisions were made, reputations forged, and alliances cemented.

The money that fuelled this spate of building came from the industrial expansion in Spain—Basque steelworks, Catalan textiles, Andalusian wine, Elche shoes, Asturian mining, and a growing financial sector—but a bit further back in this chain, the money came from the remnants of Spain's once huge overseas empire. Well into the nineteenth century, Spain’s economy was tied to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The plantations of sugar, coffee and tobacco depended on slave and forced labour which wasn't finally outlawed in all the Spanish territories until 1886. That wealth built on slaves was repatriated to Spain and reinvested in railways, banks, factories, shipbuilding and, of course, the gleaming casinos. For instance, the Güell family, the one that supported Gaudí, the Sagrada Familia architect, originally made its money from slave labour. To be fair, by the time it got to Gaudí’s sponsor, Eusebi Güell, that money had been sanitised over the years by a mixture of sound business and monied marriages. So, while the new wealth came from the industrial boom at home, a lot of the seed money had come from very dodgy beginnings.

An interesting aside here—well, I think it's interesting, and a good one should you ever be invited to form part of a Spanish pub quiz team—is that the first railway in Spain wasn't actually built on the Peninsula. It was built on the island of Cuba and opened in 1837. Spain administered its overseas possessions as being Spanish soil, so, at the time, Cuba was just as much a part of Spain as Teruel. You may get an extra point for knowing it was also the first railway in Latin America too. The first railway on the Peninsula wasn't opened till 1848 to link Barcelona and Mataró.

The style, the panache, of these clubs was important. The businessmen wanted to build something to rival other notable buildings of the time—be those theatres or the impressive municipal cast-iron and glass markets. The buildings had marble staircases, mirror-lined ballrooms, oak-panelled dining halls, sumptuous billiard and card rooms, and some of the grander places offered services from manicurists to gyms and chauffeur-driven cars. The Casino in Murcia is a good example of this lavishness with its Arab patio, covered in gold leaf, intricate tile and plasterwork and oodles of bling everywhere—well worth the entrance fee. There's no doubt that most of the local casinos, and presumably those in other regions, are still standout buildings even though it’s obvious that their days of splendour are long past.

Despite their vibrancy, casinos were institutions of exclusion. The design and culture of the casino reinforced masculine authority and prestige. Membership was overwhelmingly male, and women were absent from the daily activities that defined these clubs. They were only admitted on special occasions and, even then, their participation was carefully regulated. Women were only seen in the casinos as idealised figures, often sexualised in "soft porn" paintings where naked women were passed off as the participants in classical myths. When real, live women were admitted in person, to dances or concerts, they were expected to add an air of civilised refinement. Novelda Casino, which is now open to the general public, made an unheard-of concession when its members allowed Antonia Navarro Mira, known locally as "La Pichocha," to become a member in the early years of the twentieth century. She was allowed in because of her financial and cultural muscle. For those of you who know Novelda, one of her houses, now known as The Casa Modernista, is open regularly as a fine example of the Spanish version of Art Nouveau.

Spain lost its last overseas colonies in 1898 after a couple of humiliating defeats at the hands of the United States. With that change, lots of the money that had supported the casinos dried up. The start of the twentieth century was also a pretty edgy time in Spanish history. An uprising in Barcelona related to sending poor conscripts to die in North Africa, while the sons of the rich bought their way out of conscription, led to greater organisation of labour when the riots had quietened. The tensions in the social order gave rise to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in the 1920s and that in turn added to intense class rivalries, the abdication of the king and, eventually, the declaration of a republic in the 1930s. The military uprising to overthrow that Republican government led to the Spanish Civil War and almost forty years of dictatorship under Franco.

During the Civil War most of the casinos were requisitioned for use as convalescent homes or military command posts. After the war many of the casinos re-opened but, by then, they belonged to a time and social order now passed. Cinema, radio, cafés and sports clubs captured younger generations while political debate became a difficult area in Spain for another forty years or so. Maintaining the big, ornate casino buildings and grounds grew increasingly difficult as memberships dwindled and old age took its toll. Some repurposed their buildings but most languished in a slow decline, shabby monuments to a vanished world.

Today, many of these buildings linger in Spanish towns and cities, their faded grandeur a reminder of a time when wealth, power and ambition converged beneath gilded ceilings and parlours aromatic with Cuban cigar smoke. Their legacy is problematic. On the one hand, they are architectural treasures, testimony to the aspirations of people that sought to project modernity and cosmopolitanism, that celebrated technological advance and were loyal to their roots, but, at the same time, they are reminders of social hierarchies built on male domination, social exclusion and, in part, on the exploitation of colonial slavery.

At least with many you can ponder their contradictions as you sip on a nice cold beer or a big glass of wine from their public bars.