My guess is that some of the changes have nothing much to do with Spain, just to do with the world. After all in our first rented flat the Internet was dial up - the modem connected to the phone socket and there was a lot of squealing and singing as it connected. It didn't matter much because there were hardly any Spanish websites that functioned properly anyway.
Ringing people in the UK used to be an expensive or relatively difficult process. I remember that nearly all of we immigrants had some sort of telephone card. You dialled this or that number and it re-routed your call somehow. I seem to recall a 6€ card being good for about 45 minutes to the UK. We used to use locutorios too, places with Internet connections and telephone booths where you could make the call, or use the Internet, and then pay at the counter as you finished.
One of the horrid things about moving to a new country, new to you but not new in the sense of newly created earth's crust or the result of some political or military upheaval, is that there is a mountain of paperwork to be done all at once. In your home country the paperwork comes in dribs and drabs or, when something new happens, like getting a flat or buying a car, you usually have a support network. When I bought my first car I didn't really know what to do but my dad did. Not so here, not at first. Buying or renting somewhere to live, getting utilities connected, getting a bank account, sorting insurance, registering with your local town hall, completing the documents you need to do things financial, sorting the documentation about your residence, maybe doing your tax return, buying a car and so on and so on comes in one, seemingly never ending, torrent. What's more you don't know your way around. By some sort of miraculous process in your homeland you know how to register with a dentist or get your mail forwarded but not so in a new country. There will be different systems, different things needed and, worse still nearly everyone here doesn't speak the same language as you. When I arrived I had enough Spanish to order a beer in a bar or a meal in a restaurant, holiday Spanish, but it's a long way from there to ringing up some bloke on a dodgy mobile phone connection to get your septic tank emptied or to arrange for the delivery of twenty tons of topsoil.
People who've been through the process recently won't agree with me but those sort of administrative things have got easier. After years of being personally paperwork stable Brexit came along and I've had to do battle with Spanish bureaucracy again. Also, because I have a smidgeon of Spanish I've helped pals with their NIEs, S1 forms, TIEs etc. and I can assure you that the process is easier than it was in 2004 when we first started. You might think getting a "cita previa" for ID documents is a bit of a pain but we used to have to get to the police station before the cock crew to get a ticket for one of the available appointments for that day. If you missed getting one of the 50 or so appointments or if it got to "closing time" then you had to go back the next day.
I well remember the rigmarole, if not the detail, when I re-registered a UK plated car. There was lots of stuff to do before getting into a queue with what I hoped was the correct documentation. I had to, for instance, get someone, from some official college of engineers, to measure and draw my car to get something similar to, what we old Brits still call, a log book. With that documentation in hand I had to go to an ITV (MOT) station to get the car checked against the paperwork. That was a separate process to the standard ITV test. I also wasted some money, and a trip to Alicante, getting some sort of tax exemption form from the British Consulate. The queue to pay import duty on my 1977 car was in Elche and the process was interesting because of the car's age. I had to get the obvious things too, like insurance. The whole process probably involved around a dozen meetings, queues or appointments till I finally got to the traffic office where there were three queues. I forget what exactly they were for but there were definitely three. Let's say that the first was to tell you that you were in the wrong queue and that you needed to joining queue two. Queue two gave you the bill that had to be paid at a cash office before you joined queue three where you hoped to hand over all the documentation and hopefully get back some sort of "you have finished" paperwork in exchange. I remember the day I was told to go back to get the final registration certificate with which I could then get my number plates made up. They told me to come back on Monday for the finished paperwork, so I did. The office was closed, it was a fiesta day, a local holiday.
Nowadays an awful lot of the information about what you have to do is available online, there are forums where people who've done it before you will help with the details and sometimes nearly all of the process can be done from home with your phone or computer. People will tell me that it's still chaotic and difficult but most things are so much easier than they were. My last criminal record check, I needed one because I was teaching, I was able to do in the wee small hours from my computer. My last European Health Card took fewer than three minutes online. The very first time I got a criminal record check I had to get a form from a tobacconist and then take it to the Justice Ministry in Murcia. For my first health card I waited in a queue for over two hours to be told that, as I was on a temporary contract, my health card would be valid for only six months.
Sorry, this has become much more serious than I intended. Let's see if I can lighten it up. Here are some other things:
When we wanted to buy a house doing it honestly was really difficult. Finding someone who didn't want a good percentage of the purchase price in folding cash severely limited our choice of houses. The symbol of lots of illicit cash swilling around in dodgy deals was the 500€ note. It's a banknote that is no longer in circulation (at one time a huge percentage of all the 500€ notes ever printed were in Spain and used for money laundering of one sort and another) and Maggie tells me that, nowadays, it's quite difficult to spend 200€ notes.
I'm pretty sure that broadcast terrestrial television was just four channels when we first arrived. The two from the national broadcaster RTVE, which then had adverts, Antena 3 and Tele5. Cuatro and la Sexta were introduced in the first year we lived here. There was subscription television, I think the big one was Canal+, but the big changes came with the change to digital telly. With Netflix and Prime Video, and HBO and Apple TV and Movistar+, and all the rest, so common now it's difficult to think that the choice was so limited. For us one of the big gains of digital telly was that the broadcast Spanish stuff suddenly came with a dual soundtrack. Currently the most popular soaps among Spanish viewers are Turkish. Those soaps are dubbed into Spanish but, with a couple of presses on the remote, you can get them in Turkish. One of the first series we watched when we were first here was Desperate Housewives. It was dubbed into Spanish. I will never forget how disappointed I was when I finally saw an episode in its original English because the posh one, Bree Van de Kamp, sounded American and I'd always supposed that, underneath the dubbed Spanish, she would sound like Joanna Lumley or Penelope Keith. If you wanted British TV the only real option was to buy a big satellite dish - businesses did rebroadcast British TV locally but they were apt to go bust or get closed down as illegal - and lots of the bar talk among Britons was of transponders and Astra satellites.
Living in the countryside, as we do, there have always been underpowered small white vans on the road in front of my car. The white vans remain, and they still never exceed 80 km/h, but the bright blue overalls and workwear that their drivers sported habitually now seems to be a thing of the past.
On the road there are far fewer Guardia bike patrols than there used to be. They were dead common. Nowadays you only really see Guardia motorbikes at events like cycle or motorcycle races. Also nobody flashes any more to warn you that there is a speed trap around the corner. A Spanish pal tells me because the fines for warning of a speed trap are big and people won't risk it.
Whilst we're on driving, seatbelts were considered something very mamby pamby. There was a time when you didn't need to wear them in towns, just on the open road. Guardia and other police never wore seat belts. They argued that they would slow them up if they needed to jump out of their cars in a hurry!
In Pinoso, the number of street parking spaces has been drastically reduced because of the terraces, the outside spaces, of the bars. When we were first here terraces were not that common. The foreign demand for outside drinking and dining gave some push to the terraces but the real change came with the anti smoking legislation of 2011 when people could no longer, legitimately, smoke inside most bars and restaurants. The decline in smoking in Spain has been marked over the years. In my time I've been served at a railway station and in the Traffic Office by someone smoking and I think, though it could be my imagination, that I've been with a Spanish doctor who was smoking.
My Gran used to say that smoking stunted your growth. That, and not the poor nutrition during much of the Franco era, could be the reason that I used to tower above everyone in a crowd when we first got here. Nowadays Spanish young people are much taller, much better fed, and they are much better at blocking my view.
Drinking and driving was incredibly common in Spain. Police officers getting a brandy before they got back in their patrol cars or lorry and coach drivers mixing booze with their coffee are not just apocryphal; they were real and common. Spaniards still tend to not really consider beer to be alcohol but my impression is that drink driving has fallen off. The limits have always been stricter here than in the UK but I think that the sanctions are less severe. I could be wrong and I'm too lazy to Google the truth. Oh, and lots of drivers here are stoned too. The numbers are always difficult to compare because drugs tests are normally given to people who the police suspect of being drugged up whilst alcohol tests are given randomly. Nonetheless headlines like "Más conductores drogados que bebidos en las carreteras de Sevilla" are pretty common (More drivers in Seville drugged up than boozed up)
Gender violence, men being violent to women, is taken seriously in Spain. When women are killed by their partner or ex partner it's always a TV news story. In Francoist times, long long ago, women were controlled by men in ways that would now be attributed to Islamist groups. It took a long time for that legacy to change and that the change is obvious in the street is nothing but good. The same with same sex couples and all the rights and equality stuff where Spain has been right out at the front - for instance gay marriage has been with us in Spain since 2005. It took the UK, well most of it, till 2014 to catch up.
And for now, last but not least, timekeeping. In the early 21st century if someone arrived within an hour of the appointed time for a proper appointment that was considered punctual. I have to say that, at the same sort of time, in the UK, British Gas would give appointment slots "in the morning", that being between 07:30 and 15:00, and still not come but there is no doubt that time keeping was worse in Spain. Nowadays most people turn up when they say they will, give or take a bit. Another proof is that it is no longer safe to turn up 20 minutes late for the theatre because performances often get under way within five to ten minutes of the given time. On that, just remember that if a Spanish plumber, septic tank emptier, fuel oil supplier or builder says that they will be with you in the morning that means till 2pm and "por la tarde" means as late as 8 or 9pm. That hasn't changed!
