Gregorio Morán, a Spanish journalist and writer who became one of the most combative chroniclers of Spain’s Transition to democracy, died in Barcelona on February 23, 2026. He was 79. The cause of death was undisclosed. Born in Oviedo (Asturias) in 1947, Morán built a reputation for confronting the power networks behind the “Régimen del 78.”
His breakthrough came with the political biography Adolfo Suárez. Historia de una ambición (1979), widely treated as a seminal account and reported to have sold 100,000 copies. He later wrote the long-running weekly opinion column Sabatinas intempestivas in La Vanguardia, published from 1988 to 2017, where his direct style and refusal to align with consensus made him a fixture of Spanish political commentary.
Morán’s books pushed a revisionist critique of the official Transition story, most notably El precio de la Transición (1991), a sharply critical reassessment of post-Franco agreements and their beneficiaries. In El maestro en el erial (1998), on Ortega y Gasset and Franco-era culture, he provoked strong backlash from establishment intellectual circles by questioning cultural authority and its ties to power.
His reporting also brought legal and editorial conflict. He wrote a controversial series on the police torturer Conesa in Diario 16 and was prosecuted in Madrid over an article denouncing violent far-right networks operating with impunity. In 2014, El cura y los mandarines was dropped by Planeta shortly before distribution over a requested cut of an 11-page passage about the Royal Spanish Academy, and Morán chose to publish it with Akal, cementing his role as a dissenting historian of Spain’s cultural and political establishment.