King Juan Carlos on his hunting trip to Botswana
I once read that Kings don’t say sorry, don’t explain or justify their actions and they don’t promise to change. If they do, then it’s a sign that things are going very wrong.
Well, things have recently gone very, very wrong for King Juan Carlos of Spain. Juan Carlos not only said sorry, but he did so with bowed head, and promised that it won’t happen again.
In some ways it’s farcical. The King professes empathy with a Spain in deep crisis, soaring unemployment and genuine hardship then he sneaks off to Botswana to shoot elephants. Unfortunately, he falls and breaks his hip requiring an immediate return to Spain for an operation.
Suddenly this quick jaunt to Africa comes into the glaring spotlight of publicity. It’s really not a time for any of Spain’s leaders to be seen to be indulging in luxury holidays. That it involved shooting elephants just makes it appear even more ludicrously disconnected from the lives of the Spanish people.
Oh, and by the way, when Juan Carlos was 18 his younger brother Alfonso died in a shooting accident involving Juan Carlos. Details are rather vague but the general outline is that a pistol assumed to be empty of bullets was not.
I don’t think I have ever seen anyone crass enough to suggest that this was anything other than a tragic accident. Juan Carlos was apparently devastated. However, there is a part of me which thinks that most people in these circumstances would most likely not return to shooting as a leisure pastime.
As a final ironic twist to the tale, the king is in fact the honorary of the Spanish branch of the WWF (yes, the Wildlife organisation, not the wrestlers).
So it really looks to be a holiday in poor taste on several levels. However, in other times perhaps this news would have been allowed to pass relatively unnoticed, a joke passing from mouth to mouth and a footnote on the inside pages of the newspapers.
However, it comes at the same time as a real scandal, one involving the king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin who was indicted on charges of corruption in November.
The story centres around a nominally not for profit organization called the Noos Institute run by Urdangarin. It is believed that various public bodies in Spain, mainly the regional governments, were persuaded to commission works from the Noos Institute which were either never delivered or were enormously overpriced.
It is an apparently confirmed fact that Urdangarin has sent significant sums of public money to tax havens in both Belize and the UK.
King Juan Carlos has tried to distance himself from the situation, going as far as to say that ‘justice is equal for all’. However, there are those who believe that Urdangarin himself would not have been sufficiently influential to persuade regional governments to part with money for nothing. Spotlight back on the King….
The truth is that the monarchy in Spain is an anachronism. The constitution of Spain is the most modern, progressive and democratic in Europe. The monarchy only exists in there because of Juan Carlos as an acknowledgement of his quite remarkable role in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy.
As essentially an adoptive son to Franco, the succession of Juan Carlos to power in 1975 was greeted with dismay by all except the core of Francoists left in Spain. However, what Juan Carlos did, on being handed absolute lifetime power, was to hand it over to the Spanish people. He brokered a peaceful and broadly inclusive transition to democracy in 1978.
When a coup d’etat was launched in 1981 it was Juan Carlos personally who called round military commanders to urge them to hold fast to democracy. It was he who appeared on television to reiterate his unambiguous support for the democratically elected government of Spain. It is he who is often credited with saving Spanish democracy that day.
So you see, modern Spain really does have a great deal for which to thank King Juan Carlos. That’s why he’s still around. Really the Spanish monarchy bears no comparison to the British monarchy in terms of their day-to-day integration into the life of the nation. A jubilee to celebrate the Spanish monarchy would be inconceivable.
In Spain you get the feeling that the monarchy has been given permission to stay as long as it doesn’t make too much noise, a bit like a child who has snuck downstairs after bedtime. Now the child is misbehaving and Spain is asking why they’re still in the room.
As the events of the late 70s and 1981 fade into history, the goodwill extended to Juan Carlos the man diminishes and as that goes, the reason to maintain the expensive trappings of the monarchy disappears.
There is a genuine chance that the monarchy in Spain is nearing its end.
Bar de Juan in the village of Mairena, a successful example of reverse migration
Migration in Spain, continued…
Now for the glimmer of hope in the midst of the economic crisis in Spain. What people are realising, apparently in not insignificant numbers, is that it’s better to be poor in the countryside than poor in the city.
Families which had left to live in cities, to work in construction, for instance, have found themselves out of work and struggling to cope in their urban surroundings.
Juan is one such man. He worked in construction in the coastal city of Almeria. When the work dried up, he and his family struggled on for a while before, as he put it, “I realised that it’s better to be poor up here in the mountains than down in a city. Here I can buy two rabbits and two chickens and my family has meat forever. I can grow my own vegetables and fruit. We could be poor but we would be fed. Down in the city, you would starve.”
In fact what Juan did wasn’t to buy two rabbits (he’s still got that in reserve) but to take over the little bar in the village of Mairena.
He’s doing a fantastic job, is proving to be a great host and that’s being rewarded with custom. The village now has a shop and a bar. The school has also got two new children – in Mairena that’s a 20% leap in registrations!
Repeating itself across Spain, not in every village, but in many this return migration is potentially great news for the environment, for the continuity of knowledge and for the continued survival of rural lifestyles. All of the things which I think make rural Spain so special.
Traditional terracing in the Alpujarras
Migration in Spain continued….
I think it’s impossible to criticise this but it is possible to be concerned about its passing. In the case of the Picos, the shepherds define the landscapes of the upper mountains.
The Picos de Europa mountains are not a landscape untouched by human hand but one which has been defined and moulded by humans working more or less in conjunction with the environment.
Take that human intervention out and the landscape as we know it crumbles.
Moving south into the Alpujarras mountains and the effect of migration really comes into sharp focus. When you look at the mountains it isn’t at first obvious but the hillsides are very extensively terraced.
Ancient systems of irrigation bring the melt waters of the Sierra Nevada down through water channels, asecias, to the farms and villages. Each year, every village employs people to go up and make sure their asecias are clear.
As David, owner of Las Chimeneas, pointed out. To get water from the top of the mountain to his patch of land in Mairena, a village half way down the mountain involves something like 54 sluice gates.
Sluice gates makes it sound more modern that it is, the system is largely a thousand years old. They are streams, rock channels, some concrete canals, waterfalls. The sluice gate might be a sluice, it might be a rock.
If you tried to model the provision of water to the dozens and dozens of plots of land just around Mairena then it would be incredibly complex. And yet, some of the old boys here just know it. They don’t know how they know it and indeed would probably laugh at you if you said that what they were doing was actually very sophisticated.
The point is that you only need one generation to die out and that knowledge is gone. Once the understanding of the day to day use of the irrigation system is gone, the system falls into disrepair and swathes of these mountains become unproductive again.
Read Migration in Spain – part 1