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The way out for Spain?

Oct 222012

Ordesa National Park in the Spanish Pyrenees, rarely, if ever publicised by Spanish tourism authorities

I work in tourism and I therefore see the heart of Spain’s cities, the beautiful parts of the landscapes, I’m not out in the manufacturing belt or trading in an office so this is a patently one-sided view. In my defence I’d remind you that tourism is Spain’s largest industry.

What was striking on my recent trip to Spain were the hot spots where you could really see money coming into the country and it was coming in with the tourists.

Seville, the heart of the city around the cathedral, has a buzz about it. Restaurants are full, hotels bursting at the seams and people taking carriage rides constantly. Similarly in the heart of Madrid, there is a sense of cash flowing in where the tourists are happy. Madrid’s Mercado San Miguel is a great example of this. Barcelona is also full of visitors, all apparently spending a sizeable amount of money.

It’s here that Spain, I think, has a massive opportunity. The mass market flop and drop holidays along the Costas will always sell. The country has done well to make its cities such popular destinations for the short break market – Barcelona, Seville, Madrid and Valencia in particular stand out. What I think Spain has failed to exploit to anywhere near the extent it should, is her natural beauty.

Driving along the Pyrenees in September I was treated to a display of the most beautiful landscapes at their very best at that time of year. Along the way I was visiting, and staying in, a range of small rural hotels. Without exception, these hotels were of a price/quality ratio that I have seen nowhere else in Europe.

Here we have the most incredible landscapes, beautifully managed, easily accessible and to top it all you can sleep in a beautiful small hotel and eat great food at a price that would buy you pure mediocrity in the UK.

And yet, I have yet to see the Spanish tourist board actively promote this kind of rural tourism. I have a personal theory that this comes down to the regionalism of Spain, that promotional budgets are allocated along regional lines. Unlike cities, natural features hardly ever exist neatly within the confines of a single region. The Catalans shy away from spending their promotional budget on the Pyrenees for fear that the visitor will stray accidentally into Aragon or Navarra…The Asturians won’t mention the Picos de Europa in case the visitor stays in Cantabria by mistake. And if a visitor the Aracena hills of Andalucia ends up in Extremadura, what then?

I might be being harsh but I honestly can’t think of any other reason that a country so blessed with natural beauty would be so backwards in coming forwards.

The way out for Spain? is part 3 of a series of 3: read part 1 or read part 2.

If you want to experience a holiday to the most beautiful parts of Spain, get in touch!

Where has it all gone?

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Oct 222012

The gloriously empty airport of Castellon

While I was in Madrid in late September, there were clashes between protestors and police in front of the parliament building in Madrid. The protestors were talking in terms of storming parliament in order to reclaim democracy.

This is where the crisis in Spain I think really diverges from that we have seen in the UK.

Firstly, let’s be clear about this, plenty of people in Spain did very nicely out of the boom years. Anyone with property interests who managed to sell up before the collapse has enjoyed some serious gravy-train action.

However, the ordinary person in the street probably did rather less well during the boom years than their equivalent in the UK. I say this because people in Spain do not tend to trade up their houses. Generally, people will save up for a long time to buy their apartment and that’s where they stay. The idea of buying a small place then trading it in for a larger one, the property ladder, is simply not as prevalent in Spain as it is in the UK.

Where people in the UK were effectively realising their accumulating capital every so often as they sold their house, in Spain, the rising value of housing was a paper phenomenon for most. Obviously credit flowed and people had money to spend but it doesn’t to me feel as if the spread of boom money reached as far as it did here in the UK.

So where was all the Spanish money? I think a lot of it was in the hands of politicians. Not necessarily the national politicians, but in the hands of over-powerful local elites. It’s here that so much damage was done. The mayor of one village seeing the neighbouring village getting a public swimming pool so they’d build one until every village in a sparsely populated stretch of the Alpujarras mountains has a pristine public swimming pool open for perhaps 2 months of the year.

In the village of Benia in the Picos de Europa, population 800, there is one museum, a visitor centre and a state-of-the-art convention centre. There’s no specific demand for a convention centre here in the mountains and its use is occasional at best. In addition to these, the village has a purpose built I.T. centre which is permanently staffed and allows free internet access to the villagers.

It’s a great idea to encourage internet access in rural Spain, the country has a serious problem with migration away from rural areas. However, in this particular instance it would have been much cheaper for the authorities to buy a computer for every household in the village, pay for everyone’s internet connection and then have someone on hand to offer IT support on a roving basis. Much cheaper.

So whilst the villagers enjoy certain benefits and pride in their village, the truth is that many of these projects were poorly conceived, unnecessary and value for money simply not a factor in the planning.

And this brings me to the story of Castellón airport. Not one I had heard about until my recent trip to Spain, it symbolises everything which has gone wrong and in particular explains why the Spaniards are, almost universally, sick of the political class.

Castellón is a city of 500,000 on the east coast of Spain, just above Alicante/Valencia, just below Barcelona.

It’s less than two hours driving from Barcelona or Reus to Castellón. It’s barely an hour from Valencia, double that to Alicante. In any case, suffice to say that Castellón by any measure, is very well served by international airports within striking distance.

Not well enough served in the opinion of Carlos Fabra, leader of the Castellón branch of the Partido Popular of some 20 years’ standing.

To this end, he embarked on an ambitious project to build an airport to open Castellón to the world. In March of 2011 the airport opened at an estimated cost of €150 million.

The company responsible for the construction of the airport, Aerocas, was also awarded a 50 year contract to run the place.

Everything you could possibly want at an airport was there. A permanent staff, the cleaning contractors, the baggage handlers, even the contract for the hawks to clear birds from the approaches had been awarded. The only thing missing were planes.

Despite spending €30 million on publicity, not a single commercial plane has ever landed at Castellón airport.

And now they are having to dig up the runway because it’s actually not wide enough to permit planes to turn safely. And the €300,000 sculpture in front of the airport hasn’t been paid for.

The Valencian government has finally had enough and cancelled the airport operator’s licence. In response Aerocas are now thinking of suing the regional government for €80 million.

By the way, guess who runs Aerocas? Carlos Fabra.

It’s these debts which are leading to cuts in schools, libraries and other key services. If I were Spanish, I’d be looking to flush out the political structures which has allowed this extraordinary level of excess and greed to go unchecked.

Where has it all gone? is part 2 of a series of 3: read part 1 or read part 3.

Looking for a great holiday to Spain? Get in touch, we promise not to fly you to Castellon!

The state of Spain

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Oct 192012

A school playground in central Granada now making money as a car park

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks travelling through Spain in late September, narrowly avoiding getting washed away in Almeria.

It’s a while since I’ve spent so long in Spain at one go and I’m not sure I’ve ever covered quite such a lot of the country in such a short time. From Almeria to Granada to Seville to Madrid, Bilbao, La Rioja, the Pyrenees and then out from Barcelona.

The trip left me with a couple of abiding impressions. The first is that I love the country more than ever before, the sheer variety of wonderful places is breathtaking. The second is that I was travelling through a country in crisis.

Spain is a country divided. Unemployment is over 20% nationally but in Andalucia, it’s over 30%. The contrast between the north and south of the country is incredibly marked. You would be hard pressed, as a visitor, to notice the crisis in Barcelona whereas in Granada and Seville the signs are much more apparent.

The Gran Via, Granada’s commercial artery, has around half of its buildings and shop fronts closed up and covered with graffiti. In Seville, for the first time, I saw people sleeping out in the Barrio Santa Cruz. What I found peculiarly upsetting about the site were the lines of neat, fairly new looking suitcases they had alongside. As if you or I had gone on holiday and found ourselves having to sleep outside for the night. These aren’t hardened street sleepers, these are newcomers to the game.

Equally, the headline unemployment figures can’t be taken at face value.

Firstly, and all Spaniards will tell you this, the hidden economy is enormous. If truly 30% of all Andalucians were out of work then you would see a much more chaotic and traumatic picture. There is a lot of money, particularly in the south of Spain, hidden from view.

On the other hand, even when you do get a job, it’s hard to be given a contract which pays more than €1,000 a month. In fact that figure was often met with snorts when I brought it up, ‘Ni mucho menos’ being the response, ‘Nor anything close’.

In Seville I stood on the main shopping street in the late afternoon. It was full of people out wandering, taking their paseo. With these thousands of people and all these shops, there were hardly any, and I mean hardly any shopping bags. People simply are not spending money. There’s no cash being spent.

Whilst you can therefore say that the number of people actually not working isn’t as bad as they say, what is true is that those people with work are just barely treading water. And this is where I think it gets scary for Spain and I worry.

The people who can, educated people, are leaving. I lost count of the number of stories I heard of architects, designers, engineers, doctors, dentists, etc who were leaving Spain. Many heading off to Latin America, others out into Europe, to not just find work but to find work which pays a reasonable salary.

It’s an enormous drain of talented people. At this point in the cycle you could say that it’s the market correcting itself and supply is heading off to find demand. That’s all well and good but it strikes me that once they are gone, those people are gone for at least the medium term. When the recovery starts to gain traction in Spain, the country is going to be missing a great slew of brainpower. It’s paid to educate its people, over the past 30 years in particular, and create a country of huge potential. This potential is leaking out and will be very, very hard to recover.

The state of Spain is part 1 of a series of 3: read part 2 or read part 3.

If you would like help to arrange your holiday to Spain, get in touch, it’s still the most wonderful country!