“..no estaba muerto, estaba tomando cañas.”
(he was not dead, he was out drinking beers).

Peret’s El Muerto Vivo is not just a rollicking tune about confusing a drunk with the dead. It’s an index of a different kind of urbanism – patchy, fragmented, and dissonant – emerging against the totalising designs of Franco’s regime. While Francoist desarrollismo promised a modern Spain through highways, mass housing and tourist enclaves, this “economic miracle” was, as Paul Preston observes, a kleptocratic modernisation: prosperity funneled to technocrats, generals, the Church and the dictator’s inner circle. Corruption and clientelism shaped the urban landscape as much as concrete and bricks. It was also a project of erasure, of flattening informal neighborhoods, displacing Romani and working-class communities, and branding the country as a sanitised playground for foreigners.