Daily News Magazine from India & around the world.

Javier Bardem, the smouldering Oscar winner from No Country For Old Men (2008), unwittingly launched a Spanish summer at the Cannes Film Festival in May when he got the best actor award. Since then, it has been raining Spanish men.

When Spain were outsmarting Germany in Durban on Wednesday night, all female eyes were on the much-gelled David Villa and the newly-brunette Fernando Torres, even though Torres was on the bench till the 80th minute.

Little wonder then that in a survey conducted by BeautifulPeople. com, an online community of self-declared attractive people, 200,000 members cast their vote and named them among the top 10 most beautiful players of the FIFA World Cup. Torres and Villa were at number 2 and 3 respectively, after Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro. The fact that Villa is married and has two children has not stopped female fans from getting starry-eyed over him.

Torres, too, seems to have gone up the popularity charts after he substituted his bottle- blonde mop for his original brunette.

Before them, fellow Spaniard Rafael Nadal, the second- time Wimbledon No. 1, had sent world temperatures through the roof with the sweltering Gypsy video with Colombian pin- up pop star Waka Waka Shakira. Defined by the capris he wears on court, Nadal gets his fans raving about his ripped upper body and his dimpled left cheek.

Women, it is said, find men like Nadal — whose style is characterised by aggressive game play — more attractive than the more correct Roger Federer.

Bardem, 41, also has that rough edge and the quality expresses itself in the characters he plays on screen.

The Spaniard got the Cannes award for his portrayal of Uxbal, part criminal, part hustler and part clairvoyant, who has visions of people beyond their grave, in his favourite Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s movie, Biutiful . He is dating another Spanish hottie, Penelope Cruz, with whom he was last seen in very passionate scenes in Woody Allen’s much- acclaimed 2008 movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona .

There was an age when the Spanish conquistadores went about conquering the world with brute force. In this more sensitive age, they are conquering hearts with their redhot looks.