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The church was founded in 1960. Times were far from easy for Protestants (or Evangelicals) in Spain. There were still fifteen years left of a political regime which didn't look too kindly on any church or religion that was not the Roman Catholic Church. In fact the first years of the Palma Reformed Baptist Church were marked by unavoidable illegality, all sorts of restrictions and even open hostility on the part of the authorities and from not a few of the local people. The meetings each week had to be held in people's flats and houses, sometimes in more than one home at a time so as not to arouse suspicion on account of the number of people attending, and without the freedom to sing to the Lord. And even after the church had been able to buy their own flat, with the generous help of a foreign lady, the flat in question had to be sold again as a result of the (anti-Protestant) protests of the neighbours! Then, around 1964, the church was able to purchase the land on which our meeting-place continues to stand, and the building was put up during the years that followed, almost entirely by the church-members' own hands and in their own spare time.
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