THE COUNTRY of the future starts today

Among the 40,500 people who during these three days have passed through the warehouses of the Legazpi Matadero in Madrid to attend the 50th anniversary festival of El PAÍS were a historical secretary, Rosi Rodríguez Loranca, who, together with a driver and other employees, moved typewriters and trash cans to the empty building on 40 Miguel Yuste Street so that the journalists could start working. Some streets were still unpaved in San Blas, the peripheral district where the newspaper's headquarters were located. The neighborhood was then a collection of poorly sewn wastelands populated by small workshops, family factories and shanties. If any of those who worked in that building on May 4, 1976 had been told that morning that 50 years later information would travel by air to all parts of the planet—and even farther—and that one from a portable telephone would be able to compose, write, edit, send and publish an article with a photo included almost instantly, they would have made a face worthy of a selfie. The same as anyone could if a reporter from EL PAÍS from the future arrived to explain how the May 2076 newspaper is made. During these three days, the journalists of EL PAÍS of the present have contented themselves with showing what the daily newspaper is like and how it is made: in showing the trick, what is behind it, the apparent magician's tricks that precede each issue and each news item with a single purpose: to demonstrate that