So to the last of the winter sales. What am I bid for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted? More or less than the &pound;17.7bn that went on O2, not to mention the &pound;9.5bn that sealed the Abbey National deal? We can throw in Luton, Cardiff and Belfast airports if you like. Or, since this isn't an exclusively British affair, the cash to help France's Le Monde stay afloat. Anything to keep shareholders smiling - as the Spanish keep coming.No mistake: there is a pattern here. Grupo Ferrovial isn't stalking the British Airports Authority on a whim. Banco Santander has got the Abbey habit fast and pretty efficiently. Abertis knows how to run most of our middle-range airports already. Telefonica may or may not have splurged too far amid the mobile mayhem, but it's in good company.Spain isn't a peripheral player any longer. Europe's fifth-largest economy has enjoyed a decade of consistent growth, and that progress - at roughly double Britain's current rate - continues. It has absolutely no need of lectures from Gordon Brown. It has started to strut a little across the world stage, to flaunt a success built of concrete, imagination and vaulting ambition.Here come Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Arata Isozaki and the rest, true architects of globalisation. Where do they strut their stuff most enthusiastically? Put Bilbao's metro system in the Foster column, give Gehry the Guggenheim and Isozaki La Coruna's museum. Remember that Rogers' new airport for Madrid is the greatest infrastructure project in Europe - three times the size of Heathrow's terminal five.The point is utterly simple. From Barcelona's 1992 Olympics on, Spain has found a style and elan that set it apart. Only 30 years after Franco's death, it has become a different country. Many of those differences are charted with shrewd perception in Ghosts of Spain by the Guardian's fine Madrid correspondent, Giles Tremlett (out next month). He has watched Spain close up for 20 years. He has seen a zest for consensus - and impatience for action - sweep away the bureaucratic decay of fascism. He can sense the immensity and complexity of the change, so much hidden potential suddenly tapped.Will it last? Anyone who prophesies too blithely obviously risks rude awakening. Of course there are problems: inflation edging up, property prices teetering, a vulnerability over energy supplies, a whole portfolio of nationalist and regional problems. Doom pending? Stocks of that never run out whenever two economists drink coffee together. But that doesn't mean you can't count the triumphs, either.By chance last week I went straight from Dublin to Barcelona, a single flight and in many ways a single story: both economies pounding away, both cities transformed. Surely that shouldn't be happening, though? This is the eurozone, barren ground where the dead hand of the central bankers rules. This is everything we've been so supposedly wise to avoid - so wise, indeed, that it's not even a matter for polite conversation when joint prime ministers meet.Except, of course, that the euro has no more sunk Spain than it has sent Dublin to the bottom of the Irish Sea. It's convenient, in British terms, to look at what's not worked rather than what has. Thus Germany may be loftily lectured and France sniggered over. But European union, with a single currency with interest rates set at a level that encourages growth, has performed wonders just a step aside from this central stage.Go back to the last rites over Franco. What helped Spain come together in his perilous aftermath? The prospect of joining Europe. What has held it together and fuelled its progress ever since? The reality of belonging to Europe. When he looked around coming challenges for Guardian readers a few months ago, Spain's prime minister showed simple faith. "Europe," Jos&eacute; Luis Rodr&iacute;guez Zapatero wrote, "is the answer, the realistic answer of those who refuse to give in to pessimism or fear, and who redouble their efforts in times of difficulty."No true Brit puffed with political ambition would dare make a claim in such terms. David Cameron has lost the hymn sheet. Brown prefers his summers in Cape Cod. Yet maybe it is time to wake up. What can Telefonica do with O2 that BT didn't dare? Why is Zara the queen of high streets around the world? How will Ferrovial - building motorways from Canada to Chile - cope with Heathrow?As you land on the plane from Cork or C&oacute;rdoba, perhaps, there'll be a bump on the runway every time. Bump to wake up. Bump to remember that Europe lives vibrantly beyond the Bay of Biscay.