Ask any Spaniard and he will tell you that he is "certainly no racist". Press him a little harder, however, and he may well confess that "most of them are different from us" and "don't know how to behave".
Apart from a traditional prejudice against the large gypsy population of Spain, who still find it difficult to integrate into society, it is only in recent years that racism has reared its ugly head; probably because there were not many jobs for foreigners in Spain and it was the Spaniards themselves who, in the post-war years, were forced to emigrate to seek work abroad.
However, prosperity has made Spain, like so many other states, a popular destination for immigrants from around the world. In the early days, they were from the former colonies of Central and South America, then north Africa and the Maghreb, followed by other African countries, Asia and, most recently, eastern Europe.
In most cases these economic and usually illegal immigrants are forced into menial jobs the Spaniards will not take on; South American and Filipino women are much in demand as domestic servants, while Moroccans and South Americans find back-breaking work in Andalucia's or Catalonia's fruit and vegetable plantations, often working under stifling heat in the thousands of plastic greenhouses which provide the European dining table with out-of-season fruit and vegetables.
They often live in appalling overcrowded conditions in substandard housing or ghetto communities and are rejected by the locals, although some nationalities are made more welcome than others.
Last autumn the inhabitants of the small country town of Totana, near Murcia, staged demonstrations to defend the right to stay of a group of some 300 Ecuadorian labourers who had found work picking fruit and vegetables and were under threat of expulsion for lack of work papers. But they took no steps to defend another 300 Moroccans working alongside them in the same fields.
The Moroccans in Totana complain they were marginalised, were refused service in local bars, shops and restaurants, and that the locals refused to rent them housing.
With the rising temperatures of this summer, there has been a parallel rise in racial attacks on immigrants in different parts of the country, particularly in Catalonia, where a 22-year-old youth was arrested at the weekend for inciting racial hatred over the Internet. Last weekend gangs of skinhead youths roamed Barcelona's Tarassa suburb attacking any Moroccan who came in their path.
Early on Monday morning the nearby town of Banyoles, site of the rowing events in the 1992 Olympic Games, was the latest scene for xenophobic attacks. An apartment building housing African workers, mainly from Gambia and Mali, was set on fire by unidentified assailants and 20 people were forced to flee by climbing down drainpipes or jumping from first-floor balconies.
Three women from Mali were seriously injured in the attack. One fell from a second-floor window and two others, one of them pregnant, were badly burned. A few hours later someone set fire to a bundle of rubbish on the steps of a local mosque.
It is not the first time Banyoles, (population 14,300, 700 of whom are African agriculture and construction workers) has hit the headlines for its lack of racial sensitivity.
For years, the lifelike mummified remains of a Kalahari bushman, armed with a spear and standing upright in a glass case, formed the centrepiece of the town's museum alongside stuffed animals, two-headed animals and other freaks of nature.
"El Negrito", who was donated to the museum by an eccentric local doctor in 1916, has been a controversial subject in this age of political correctness. The mummy was put into a storeroom for the duration of the Olympics, after several African countries threatened to boycott the games if he remained on show, but re-appeared once the Olympic flame was extinguished.
The Banyolese were very fond of their "Little Black Man", and were furious when PC finally caught up with them last year and they were forced to ship him back to Botswana, his country of origin, where he was warmly welcomed as a long-dead hero.
The African immigrants of today are alive and not in glass cases, but the reluctance of some local people to accept them threatens a hotter than usual autumn for Spain where racial harmony is concerned.