The restless struggles of these men with unquiet hearts were carried forward in the social and economic context of El Marco de Jerez, where they were constantly rebuffed by a landed oligarchy which sat secure on the rich soils of the vineyards of southern Spain. Indeed, there is probably no more cohesive and tight-knit political clan in the whole of Spain than this sherry oligarchy, which is so closely bound by common economic and political interests, and by common cultural characteristics, that it composes an almost monolithic class fraction which has traditionally exercised its political power with supreme composure and confidence. Moreover, in its unrelenting opposition to the organizations of the working class in the vineyards and the pueblos, it was a quintessential expression of the national financial—landowning oligarchy which proved to be the most enduring base of social support for the Franco regime (as I argue in Chapter 4). So whenever the Communist Party referred (as it so often did) to that ‘monopolistic oligarchy characterized by its integration with the large land-owners’ (e.g., PCE: 1973), it could have been pointing to the particular case of El Marco.