Economic crisis strikes deep into heart of Spain
Unemployment’s driving breakup of towns and family life
ECIJA, SPAIN — At 10 a.m. on a hot Friday, Antonio Rodriguez Alvarez and his brother, Francisco, sit outside a bar in Ecija drinking an anise liquor with water. Unemployed labourers, they visit the job centre daily at 9 a.m. in search of work. When there is none, they repair to the bar and worry.
Antonio, 44, is divorced and living with his mother. He split with his wife partly because of constant fights about money and his lack of a job. He now weighs going to France, where he heard there is work picking fruit. His 22-year-old daughter is planning a move to the Canary Islands to work in the tourism industry. He said he doesn’t blame her.
“Young people are leaving this town,” he said. “There’s no hope, no jobs. Days are long. You wake up, it’s the crisis. You go to bed, it’s the crisis. It’s always the same around here.”
While crowds in Madrid and Barcelona take to the streets to protest austerity measures triggered by the European crisis, Spain’s small towns and rural areas are quietly disintegrating. The despair of Ecija, a city of 40,000 in the southern region of Andalusia, is measured in rising divorce rates and fleeing young people. Pride in Spain’s fourdecade rise has been replaced with bitterness over the collapse of an economy built on construction and real-estate speculation that has left wreckage deep in the Spanish heartland.
“Spain’s economic miracle was science fiction,” said Javier Madero Garfias, 67, an architect who has designed hundreds of Ecija’s buildings since 1973. “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to what we used to be. This is the first time the kids
“There’s no hope, no jobs. You wake up, it’s the crisis. You go to bed, it’s the crisis.”
UNEMPLOYED SPANIARD LABOURER
are worse off than their parents in Spain.”
Spain is in its second recession since 2009 and its economy is predicted to contract 1.3 per cent in 2013. Industrial output has declined for 12 consecutive months. On Sept. 27, the government revealed its fifth austerity package in nine months that includes 13 billion euros ($16.9 billion) in tax increases and budget cuts. The government has already reduced unemployment benefits and civil servant salaries while raising sales taxes.
In Ecija, the unemployment rate has soared to 30 per cent after mattress and furniture factories that supplied the housing industry closed, said Juan Wic Moral, mayor from 2003 to 2011.
“Four years ago we wanted to build a three million-euro public swimming pool, a new town hall and three new bridges,” Wic said. “These days we’re talking about a new soup kitchen.”
Ecija is a town of whitewashed homes in a maze of narrow, winding streets that date to the Roman era. Its culture is also centuries old, from the horse breeding that began in the region 600 years ago to the 11 Baroque church towers that mark the skyline.
Rural Spain, the land of Don Quixote and El Cid, has long been romanticized by politicians and in popular culture. Andalusia is particularly celebrated, with its traditions of bull fighting and flamenco dancing regarded as uniquely Spanish.
During the boom years between 2000 and 2006, Ecija thrived. Employment grew as factories built home fixtures and furnishings. Madero, the architect, added as many as 10 freelancers to his permanent staff of five to keep up with his building projects. Construction and real estate “acted as a vacuum cleaner,” sucking up all the local capital and talent, said Fernando Fernandez, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid.
When the boom ended, Ecija had nothing to fall back on. Spain went from building 60,000 houses a month in 2006 to fewer than 5,000 a month this year. In 2004, Madero’s firm designed buildings that contained between 500 and 600 apartments. This year, he expects just 25 units will be built. His firm has shrunk to three employees: Madero, his daughter and his son-in-law. He fired his own brother.
“I never imagined construction would end so abruptly,” Madero said. “One day the phone stopped ringing.”
Called “the frying pan of Andalusia,” Ecija often records Spain’s hottest temperatures. In August, when the thermometer reaches 44 C, the city’s streets are empty for much of the day, as residents with the means escape to the beach or retreat into air-conditioned homes.
At a bar devoted to Ecija Balompie, the town’s third division football team, they still talk about the time in 2006 when David Beckham’s Real Madrid team played the locals, and came in for drinks after. Both the team and the town haven’t been the same. Business at the bar has fallen 50 per cent in two years, said the owner, Antonio Lopez.
“Factory workers used to come after their shift,” Lopez said. Since the plants closed “there are no customers.”
When he was mayor, Wic had ambitious plans for Ecija. He envisioned building on its manufacturing base by adding jobs in renewable energy. He said he hoped the city’s population would grow by as much as 50 per cent to 60,000.
“The best times for Ecija were the Roman Empire, the 18th century and five years ago,” Wic said. “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to that kind of richness.”
Wic lost his re-election bid last year when his party was swept out of office across Andalusia. Now he works as a school administrator, and has seen his pay cut along with other civil servants. This year, he makes 1,800 euros a month after taxes, down from 2,200 last year, he said.
“I’ll be buying one shirt this year instead of five and I won’t be fixing my car,” he said.
As the economy collapses, the city has become obsessed with once arcane concepts such as Spanish debt yields, Wic said.
“Even the taxi drivers are talking about bond yields,” he said.
Short and bearded, Madero, the architect, drives around Ecija’s narrow streets in his Mini Cooper. He points out the buildings he’s designed over 40 years: a doughnutshaped apartment complex, a downtown plaza, private homes tucked behind imposing walls, a 40-bed hospital. A new project for two buildings with 56 apartments has been stalled because banks won’t make loans for mortgages, Madero said.
As he drives down Calle de Santa Cruz, once a busy shopping street, he notes that more than a dozen stores have closed.
“Calle de Santa Cruz makes me want to cry,” he said.
Madero was born in 1945 to a well-connected Ecija lawyer. After attending university in Seville, Madero opened his architecture firm in 1973, just as Spain was shaking off the rust of the Franco era.
Much of Spain’s growth was built on tourism and construction fuelled by cheap credit, Madero said. Madero said he succumbed to that temptation, spending more than he should have on his dream house, which he designed and had built in 2006. The three-story home, in downtown Ecija, incorporates a 12th century city wall, a pool and a room for his collection of 93 singing canaries.