Spain's rainless plain
Photo: asocall/ / CC BY 2.0
The Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodgriguez Zapatero, is in Washington this week. The last time he was in the U.S., for the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, there was a small diplomatic rumpus because his two daughters, Laura and Alba, appeared at a photo op with Michelle and Barack Obama. In Spain there is a pact not to publish pictures of the Zapatero kids for security reasons. In Pittsburgh they were revealed as very trendy Goths, dressed all in black.
You could say that this is a suitable color for the state of the Spanish economy, with 18 percent unemployment the sickest in the western world. Underlying this suffering is the role of the country’s greatest asset, its climate. The two most stricken sectors of the economy are tourism and construction, and they are linked. For the populations of northern Europe, Spain plays something of the same role as does Florida for our northern snowbirds. Scandinavians, Germans and Brits, all with long summer vacations, have been major buyers of getaway villas.
This triggered an unbridled construction boom that has left its skeletal debris, large unfinished projects, many with weed-ravaged golf courses, all along the Mediterranean coast, from Catalonia to Andalusia.
These projects, in their turn, created unsustainable demand for water,
in a country that has suffered serial droughts and their inevitable
consequence, brush fires. The city of Barcelona, in particular, faces a
serious water deficit. So, an accidental benefit of the economic
crisis has been, at least temporarily, a brake on ill-advised vacation
developments.
This autumn there are many celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Eastern Europe from the Communist stasis. The liberation of Spain in 1975 from the oppression of Generalissimo Franco is often now forgotten but it had an equally dramatic transformative effect. More than anywhere else in Europe, I believe, the cultural impact was as great, or greater, than the political. The particular genius of the Spanish eye in the visual arts and in architecture, which has in its DNA a potent blend of the Moorish and the Iberian, had been repressed by the utter mediocrity of taste under Franco, and caught fire with his exit.
Few cities in the world can match the creative panache of Barcelona where the work of Picasso, Dali and Miro set the innovative pace and where the buildings of that delirious, god-inspired crank Antoni Gaudi broke every linear rule. In Madrid, a less vivacious city, the renovated Prado is now one of Europe’s finest galleries. Then there is Seville, the gemstone of Andalusia, where enlightened protection of the ancient city center is combined with vastly improved infrastructure.
The real test of Spain, once its economy mends, will be to manage the tourism generated by its peerless assets while acknowledging how fragile the environmental qualities are, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. It’s understandable if, right now, Prime Minister Zapatero just wishes for us all to return to Spain, eat our way through the bounty of the many regional cuisines, wash it all down with the diverse vintages that have suddenly emerged as world class, and push the limits of museum fatigue. I will certainly do my bit, and that’s a promise. But it’s a different world and water sets its limits.
This autumn there are many celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Eastern Europe from the Communist stasis. The liberation of Spain in 1975 from the oppression of Generalissimo Franco is often now forgotten but it had an equally dramatic transformative effect. More than anywhere else in Europe, I believe, the cultural impact was as great, or greater, than the political. The particular genius of the Spanish eye in the visual arts and in architecture, which has in its DNA a potent blend of the Moorish and the Iberian, had been repressed by the utter mediocrity of taste under Franco, and caught fire with his exit.
Few cities in the world can match the creative panache of Barcelona where the work of Picasso, Dali and Miro set the innovative pace and where the buildings of that delirious, god-inspired crank Antoni Gaudi broke every linear rule. In Madrid, a less vivacious city, the renovated Prado is now one of Europe’s finest galleries. Then there is Seville, the gemstone of Andalusia, where enlightened protection of the ancient city center is combined with vastly improved infrastructure.
The real test of Spain, once its economy mends, will be to manage the tourism generated by its peerless assets while acknowledging how fragile the environmental qualities are, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. It’s understandable if, right now, Prime Minister Zapatero just wishes for us all to return to Spain, eat our way through the bounty of the many regional cuisines, wash it all down with the diverse vintages that have suddenly emerged as world class, and push the limits of museum fatigue. I will certainly do my bit, and that’s a promise. But it’s a different world and water sets its limits.
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