Within this small story of the newspaper El País, from my personal approach, I liked being a director of administration for more than ten years, participating in some of the creative episodes of the newspaper in its early days.
One of those cases was related to my traveling hobbies, and more specifically to what was my second visit to Japan, during which I maintained contacts with the Japanese press, the Daily Mainichi, a newspaper with more than a million copies in circulation, and which for quite some time had been publishing a splendid Yearbook, in English, that was distributed throughout the world.
The idea of doing something like this in Spain seemed interesting to me, and from the consulting company Iberplan, of which I was technical director, we offered the project to Editorial Planeta, dealing with Fernando Lara Bosch, son of the founder. We had a good result, but after the second year, my deputy at Iberplan, José Manuel Revuelta, and I realized that we had to aspire for more.
And so things were, the El País Yearbook became a reality, based on the ideas that we proposed to Ortega Spottorno and Jesús Polanco. The thing went ahead after some studies, and since the first edition, 1982, it was published with great circulation: a double printing had to be done, reaching a total of 140,000 copies sold.
For ten years I directed the El País Yearbook, maintaining very acceptable sales figures, and when I was separated from the newspaper and all PRISA activities, the Yearbook continued to be published for a while.
Amando de Miguel, the most popular of our sociologists, told me at that time: “Ramón, you made the best social archive in Spain, and some members of the board of directors of PRISA did not welcome that, starting with whoever you know…”.