Concept
El País (el paˈis; The Country) is a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Spain. El País is based in the capital city of Madrid and it is owned by the Spanish media conglomerate PRISA. It is the second-most circulated daily newspaper in Spain . El País is the most read newspaper in Spanish online and one of the Madrid dailies considered to be a national newspaper of record for Spain (along with El Mundo and ABC). In 2018, its number of daily sales were 138,000. Its headquarters and central editorial staff are located in Madrid, although there are regional offices in the principal Spanish cities (Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao, and Santiago de Compostela) where regional editions were produced until 2015. El País also produces a world edition in Madrid that is available online in English and in Spanish (Latin America). El País was founded in May 1976 by a team at PRISA which included Jesus de Polanco, José Ortega Spottorno and Carlos Mendo. The paper was designed by Reinhard Gade and Julio Alonso. It was first published on 4 May 1976, six months after the death of dictator Francisco Franco, and at the beginning of the Spanish transition to democracy. The first editor-in-chief of the daily was Juan Luis Cebrián. El País was the first pro-democracy newspaper within a context where all the other Spanish newspapers were influenced by Franco's ideology. The circulation of the paper was 116,600 copies in its first year. It rose to 138,000 copies in 1977. In 1978, El País suffered a far-right terrorist attack due to political upheaval. Four people were injured, two greatly, and one died. The building also suffered structural damage. El País filled a gap in the market and became the newspaper of Spanish democracy, for which role El País was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and the Humanities in 1983, at a time when the transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy was still developing. The paper's first Director (until 1988) was Juan Luis Cebrián, who came from the daily newspaper Informaciones.