Friendlycard said…
John:

“Most of us, I think, are posting from the UK. We are very aware of the global nature of the economic crisis, but are also aware of UK-specific problems.

Could you rate for us the magnitude of the economic problems being experienced by Spain – better than Britain, the same, worse?“
February 1, 2009 8:00 PM

I will try to answer this as best I can – but please bear in mind:

We have a couple of acres of land, our house & 2 cars (all paid for). I do a few odd jobs for others with land and houses that aren’t always here (Spanish and English) but most of my days (weather permitting) are spent on the land. So I am not really part of the typical economy.

What follows is only from my own experience. It’s off the top of my head with no research. If anyone knows more about it I’d welcome the input.

We live 2km from the local village (population about 80) and about 8km from the nearest town with a population of around 2,000. It is a very rural area where the older folk are still involved on the land but the young ones who got a chance to go to college/uni mostly never came back. What remained of the young ladies seem mostly to have been lucky enough to find a husband in a city. And the young men drifted towards construction.

Building has been the real driving force in this area along with tourism (a bit around this area will hill-walking, horse-riding & mountain-biking but more touristy down on the costas). And of course a lot of the building – whether on houses or hotels or on holidays themselves – has been financed by the housing/credit bubble in the UK. With that gone there are many people unemployed and struggling now with no obvious way out of the situation.

I understand that the limit for unemployment benefit is 2 years and that a good many are already reaching that point. There’s even the situation now where the young ex-builders are prepared to harvest olives and work the fields! But they’d be lucky to get 50 euros a day doing that. We used to have a good few Romanians building round these parts but most seem to have drifted back home.

I don’t think many people round here are too concerned about the Spanish banks. They didn’t seem to get into such a mess (or weren’t allowed to). In any case cash is king around here. Apparently the vast majority of 500 euro notes in circulation are here in Spain. The Spanish have a very serious distrust of large organisations.