Los ladrónes

On his return to the UK from Guadeloupe in 1979, James Callaghan, the then Labour prime minister, downplayed the economic difficulties afflicting the country – industrial disputes, continued strikes by workers in crucial industries, unemployment, power cuts and so on – and denied living in a time of ‘mounting chaos’. This comment was summed up in typical glib fashion by The Sun as: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’. I don’t mean to credit that particular paper with having contributed to my world view in any way, but this phrase does sometimes come to mind when I open the door of the Bunker on a weekday morning. To see the kids and their parents, stepping out of gleaming 4x4s that they struggle to manoeuvre round the car park, the dads in crisp white shirts and those kind of boating shoes you’re only allowed to wear once you enter a certain tax-bracket, the mums all teetering heels, intimidating sunglasses and faces botoxed to bursting, you can forget that you live in a country which, to believe the figures at any rate, is staring into the abyss.

Unemployment in Spain still stands at over 25%, with the rate more than double that for under 25s. In April, the national debt was around €990 billion, equivalent to about 95% of GDP. A bit of light Googling turns up this frankly hellish bit of kit, which is sort of like one of those clocks that’s supposed to tell you the precise time of your own death, but for an entire country. Of course, for all I know it’s as accurate as UKIP’s figures about Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, but it certainly looks scary.

In addition to its financial concerns, Spain appears to be suffering from political dissatisfaction and disaffection. Nothing really unfamiliar about that though, and in fairness the Spanish still managed to muster a 10% greater turnout than their UK counterparts in the recent EU elections, although this is less impressive when you realise the figure is still less than half the electorate -around 45%. People who I spoke to at the time seemed to be playing an all-too-familiar tune of ‘the 2 main parties are the same, they don’t do anything/they only look out for themselves, there’s no point voting, etc’. When I asked a friend of mine before the election who he would be voting for, he said no one. In his opinion, the Left waste money, the Right withhold it, and the representatives of both are corrupt ladrónes to a man. Another didn't vote for similar reasons. The president, he said, was un inútil. Presumably this extended to all the alternatives on offer too. Thus, as elsewhere, minority parties did well. The elections saw a somewhat unexpected result for the left-wing eurosceptic Podemos, with 7.9% of the vote. Not bad for a party that has only existed since March. However, the ruling Popular Party actually held its majority, albeit with significant losses. Perhaps this is a sign of true voter apathy.

On the most recent of my triannual trips to the hairdressers, I got talking – with the help of the Romanian man cutting my hair – to a woman about her two grown-up children, both of whom are currently in the UK looking for work. What struck me was that both her children seemed to be in the medical profession in some capacity. I say ‘seemed’ because between my lousy Spanish, the noise of the clippers and the fact that she was behind me talking quite quietly I couldn't get everything she was saying. She definitely said the word hospital. Maybe they were in hospital? Anyway, if she said what I think she said, it would support one of the more depressing things that I've read about Spain recently, which ascribed a slight drop in the youth unemployment rate to the amount of young people leaving the country. If enough of these prove to be highly educated young professionals, then Spain may have to add brain-drain to its list of woes.

Oh, and the King abdicated the other day, but apart from shooting elephants nobody seems sure what he did anyway.

Taken together, all this does seem to lead you to the conclusion that - to quote a colleague of mine - Spain is ‘monumentally fucked’.

Of course to a large extent much of the above is just flimsy extrapolation based on anecdotal evidence collected by someone who is not an economist, has a shaky grasp of the language and who hasn't lived here that long. But then what did you expect? This is sort of a travel blog. At least I'm not in bloody Thailand.

At any rate the point I'm trying to make in a roundabout, A-level sociology kind of way, is that because of where I work, and the parents who – in brutal, sober truth – pay my wages, I don’t see much of la crisis on a daily basis. A few weeks ago we had a charity fun-run at school. One boy told me that his grandfather had sponsored him €100. That’s very generous, I said, how many laps of the course did he have to do to get it? No, the boy said, he’s sponsoring me €100 per lap. Suddenly his grandfather's offer didn't seem that generous at all, and once the kid had done over 20 laps, it started to become meaningless. I remember being told once that generosity should be measured not by how much you give but by how much you hold back. This place would turn me into a Christian, if these people weren't all Catholics.

True, there appear to be any number of crises that flounce and gnash their way breathlessly through the parental WhatsApp group every 48 hours or so, but these are much more in the order of ‘On the school trip yesterday Year 4 had to wait too long for food and water!’ than ‘Half of all young people can’t find a job’, and I'm not sure anyone outside of the padel court inner circle cares very much.

But leave the school gates and the signs are there. Chief amongst them are the almost ubiquitous vacant lots that seem at times to occupy not just the space in between streets but at times the streets themselves, their graffitied concrete skeletons hulking and creaking on crossroads, their stretches of empty land fenced off as if the dead scrub, thistle, broken stone and twisted plastic they contain were species in need of some special protection, or part of some upside-down conservation project. Perhaps this fencing off is highly appropriate, as these areas of scrabbling brown earth seem almost to stand as exhibits in a living museum; snapshots of Spain before the crash, the boom years optimism of their signs proclaiming new homes and new lives almost crass now amongst the creeping, brittle weed, much like the se vende messages that hang cracking and peeling from balconies and seem almost to be part of the structure of the buildings they adorn.

Halted and hypothetical construction is a common theme beyond the town too. On a recent school trip to a natural park and nature reserve not too far away, we passed through an enormous holiday complex owned, predictably, by the family of one of my students. Like all out of season holiday resorts, it looked like the last place you would ever want to go on holiday. As we drove though, my colleague started pointing out to me the various proposed and aborted buildings that littered the ciudad de vacaciones sulking on the coast to our right. Areas destined to be swimming pools, golf courses, bars and so on sat either side of the road, waiting silently for nothing to happen.

These spaces exist in a kind of purgatory, a land limbo. Un-useful to the humans that own them but unsuitable for nature to return to them, they await the judgement of someone with enough money, or enough credit, to turn them into something with purpose, or at least walls and a roof. Until then they remain impudently fenced off, lest someone misuse the land that is not being used for anything else.

Out of interest, the natural park we visited was one of the proposed locations for Disney Land. Obviously it never went ahead, but not for lack of funds. One of the reasons that the area of the park is of interest is that it sits on eight metres of peat which, thankfully, is not the safest foundation for rollercoasters and big pink castles.

It may be that the lack of construction has hit this area particularly badly, but to be honest it’s probably the same all along the Mediterranean coast. What is certainly true is that the big industry along this section of the Azahar is ceramics, which depends largely on construction to keep going. As well as rows and rows of orange trees, the train to Valencia takes you past several large ceramics factories, along with the omnipresent abandoned or unfinished buildings, converted by time into weird arboreta, trees growing trough their smashed windows, mossy plants hanging from sill and girder. Mounds of broken tiles glint blue and white in the sun. Once in Valencia you can of course visit the Nou Mestalla, second and as yet unfinished home ground of Valencia CF, the financially unstable, under-performing, Singaporean-owned, third most successful team in Spain and - according to Wikipedia at any rate - rivals of my adopted local club CD Castellón. After having seen Castellón and read a little about them, I assume that this rivalry is based on former glories rather than current form, and is probably increasingly one-sided. They may have come 5^th in La Liga in 1973, and been runners-up in the Cope del Rey of the same year, but when I saw them a month or so ago for the last home game of the season, which I later learned was also a relegation decider, the 16,000 capacity stadium of the now fourth-flight side managed to attract just 900 supporters. This setup has its advantages of course; tickets are around €5, you can pretty much choose where you sit, and at the end of the game you can go on to the pitch for a bit of a run around if you fancy it. In addition, Castellón must surely enjoy one of the largest ultra-to-ordinary-fan ratios of any club in the world. The Linea Albinegra come to every game complete with flares, drums and a catchy repertoire of chants, and sit shouting their hearts out in the first few rows behind gol norte. My experience of football firms is somewhere just below nothing, but these seemed friendly enough. Much less appealing is the contingent of hardcore boots and braces right wing fans (it would seem the Linea is politically on the Left) who sit at the southern end of the Nou Castalia, though not many were in evidence for my visit. On a good day, the two groups hurl abuse back and forth over the players and, the story goes, in the absence of any firms from rival clubs to fight (Valencia being too high and mighty to make the train ride up) they simply fight each other. Incidentally and perhaps predictably, the club’s fall from grace was partly due to financial reasons. Specifically, the club was relegated from the Segundo B (third) division for failing to pay its players. As far as I know this is something you pretty much have to do. Hardly surprising then that the Castellón players who, by a weird twist of circumstance, used to live in the flat I have just signed for were a little unreliable with their rent payments. Mind you, all that was only a few years ago; I assume the main reason that the team’s ended up where they have is that they’re not that good at football.

But enough about that. All this talk of smashed windows, unfinished buildings, failing football teams and barren land is probably a little depressing. Spain isn't just somewhere cranes go to die. (That noise you can hear by the way is the entirety of the Spanish population breathing a collective sigh of relief at my saying that. For a minute they were worried that my razor sharp analysis might have consigned them to history's slag heap). Things might be looking up. The country is actually coming out of recession. I definitely half-read the words ‘upgraded’ and ‘forecast’ the other day, though I can’t help but feel that a shift from 0.7%  to 1.2% projected growth will do little for most people and a lots for a few. On the vacant lot front, one of them up the road now has a big hole dug in it, almost as if they are planning to put foundations there. In a more creative use of space, another has been converted into communal allotments, where people are successfully growing all manner of veg. On the other hand, the recent performance of the national side will do little to lift spirits, but that football bit didn't quite fit with the rest of the post anyway, so it’s something of a side issue. I mainly put it in to break up the economic stuff, which is probably a bit dry when coming from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, let alone a slightly hungover primary school teacher who lives with lizards.

So, it seems there are at least a few reasons to be cheerful. Maybe in fact, as another Labour prime minister said in 1997, things can only get better. Or was it D.Ream? Either way, while everyone waits for that to happen, it’s undeniable that the region and the country are faced with a hefty task. What is to be done? Obviously I don’t know, but my Spanish teacher has an idea.

Unlike some other places along this stretch of coast – Alicante and Benidorm for example – Castellón is not touristy. There are various reasons for this. One reason is that it is, bluntly, pretty ugly, famously ugly in fact, and regarded by some as the ugliest city in Spain. Another is that, given that there are either more attractive or more well-established tourist destinations nearby, there’s not much reason to come here. I maintain that Castellón owes much of its lack of appeal to its location. Although it has a very nice beach, the town itself is actually around 6km  from the coast, the decision to build it there taken – so the story goes - in order to thwart pirates, who as is well known will not walk more than 4km to do their looting. The fact that the town does have a port which, necessarily, is by the sea and therefore not safe from pirate attack, seems then to be a bit of a logistical cock up. But never mind. I certainly sleep easier at nights knowing that I am safe from pillage and plunder at the hands of black-toothed, grog-swilling, lazy, slightly overweight pirates. After all, for all I know, what I think is building work up the road could in fact be people burying treasure.

Whatever the reason, there aren't any tourists here. Perhaps though, there could be. You may or may not know that Castellón has an airport. If you didn't know I wouldn't worry, and I certainly wouldn't go booking any flights, because since it opened in March 2011, not a single passenger plane has landed there. In fact the ‘ghost’ airport is something of a running joke. Built with 150 million imaginary Euros, and complete with a statue by the astonishingly bad local artist/sculptor Juan Rippolés, it’s regarded as a symbol of wasteful boom years spending. Carlos Fabra, the former president of the provincial government who oversaw the project, is currently serving four years for tax fraud, having decided he'd really rather not pay tax on €700,000 of his income. Ladrón seems to be a pretty accurate assessment in this case. 

However, the fortunes of the airport may be about to change, at least according to Emilio, as new owners have signed whatever documents they need to sign to get it up and running starting from September. He maintains that if people could fly here cheaply, like they can to Alicante or Benidorm, then the benefits of the town – beach, surrounding mountains and countryside, proximity to Valencia – would become apparent to visitors. When he told me I was a little taken aback; there seemed something depressingly familiar about tourism as a solution to Spain’s economic difficulties. Did people want Castellón to become a tourist destination? Weren't the Spanish a bit tired of hoards of drunken, pasty North-Europeans descending on their (sort of) seaside towns and stripping them of their character? Wasn't he worried about pirates? It’s not that we want tourists, he replied, it’s that we need them. In fairness he may be right. For better or worse, tourism does create jobs and wealth and as Spain seems to be short on both at the moment perhaps this should be considered a priority. On the other hand, while it doesn't rely on imaginary money, it does seem to be a solution that relies on money that belongs to other people, who could just as easily go and spend it somewhere else. Tourism also wouldn't make the town more attractive, but in fairness it couldn't make it much uglier. It would still be ugly, but it might be ugly with more money and jobs to go around. 

So is Castellón the next Benidorm? I don’t know, and by this stage you probably don’t care. But listen there wasn't a post for May so you had it coming. I'm minded to think that it will take a bit more than bums on barstools to solve Spain’s problems, but other solutions do appear a bit thin on the ground. Meanwhile, all is well in the world of the wealthy private school parent. There’s also a new king now. So that’s that. I just hope pirates don't fly Ryanair.

Relegation decider. 1-1. They stayed up.

Rubbish sculpture, useless airport.