Spanish Shilling

Andalucía was always ‘Red’ right up until recent times.

Up to, and after the Civil War, the enormous estates that made up the fertile part of the region was under the thumb of the latifundistas, the absent landlords from Madrid and elsewhere.

During the War, or at least until the fascists regained control, the land was run (no doubt ineptly) by the colectivos. The worker soviets. The cities were impoverished, and many people – those that could – had left for Catalonia, Algeria, France, Germany and where possible, Mexico and South America. A figure given suggests 2,700,000 emigrated searching for a better life elsewhere.

The huge majority of the andaluces in those difficult times were lefties – perhaps understandably – and when Franco eventually went to His Reward in 1975, Spain soon threw forth a progressive leader from Seville – Felipe González and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, the PSOE.

Spain took off, under the new democracy, but Andalucía, always poor and forgotten by Madrid, continued to lag far behind. Its regional government, based in Seville and held by PSOE figures, was noted for its corruption.

Seville: not only the capital of Andalucía’s eight provinces, but also its wealthiest. They say that the money came in – but it never left to be distributed in the satellite provinces (particularly Almería, at almost seven hours by train).

Poor leadership: Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán caught in the ERE scandal; Susana Díaz, inept and then the one after her… (you know, I’m not even going to bother to look him up).

Now, in 2026, those people are all gone – some with prison sentences, others deserving of them. Even Felipe González, Seville’s most famous son, is now under a cloud.

The Junta de Andalucía, the regional authority, is currently in the hands of a conservative. He’s Juanma Moreno, perhaps the third or fourth in importance in the whole of the PP. Elections are to be held on May 17th and he’ll no doubt get in again.

How did the voters come to switch their allegiances?

For one thing, they discovered a social class below them: the immigrants.

Second, as above, they saw the corruption and graft in the socialist camp.

Thirdly, simply voting conservative gives one, at least and if nothing else, the sensation of having joined the middle classes.

And life goes on. Only, it doesn’t if you get ill.

Juanma Moreno, like Isabel Díaz Ayuso in Madrid, has been supporting the private health sector at the expense of the public one. Ayuso is stained with the unnecessary deaths of the 7,291 elderly folk in the residencias during the Covid, Juanma has the problem of the lost breast cancer results which affected several thousand women. They have both been seen to be dismantling their regional public health systems.

The PSOE-A only has the one shot at the moment in its electioneering (despite having a senior ex-Government minister as their candidate), and that’s the state of the Servicio Andaluz de Sanidad. The public health service is clearly underfunded and being drained by the private sector – and there are many who don’t have the funds for private insurance.

The elections in Andalucía will probably run as expected, but supposing Moreno has to come to a deal with Vox. Will their ‘national priority’ put me back at the far end of the waiting list, in a public hospital that is sorely under-financed?

El País looks at waiting lists across Spain. Andalucía comes out in last place for operations (173 days). 

Opinion from the ABC here: ‘Many people from Almería feel like they're Andalusians abroad, needing to know about the privileged Andalucía when dealing with administrative matters or emergencies, and not just medical ones. You go to them, the Andalusians of Almería, and they welcome you as if you've arrived at a sister tribe, isolated more by time than by distance…’ In short, Almería is a long way away from the headquarters of its regional government in Seville.

My local hospital is in Huercal Overa – the farthest you can get from Seville without leaving the region entirely. It’s 423kms by road. It’s an easy place to forget when you are a bureaucrat with a nice view of the Guadalquivir from your office window.

I used to go – now and then as one does – to the old very run-down hospital that would do service for Northern Almería. The waiting room had different chairs in it, scavenged from offices, homes and even old cars. A friend of mine was waiting once for her turn, and a glass lamp suddenly detached itself from the ceiling and landed on her head. ‘I’d better deal with that first’, said the doctor as he came through the door.  

Manuel Chaves opened the new hospital back in 1999. I have a photo somewhere.

It was pretty good – modern, close-by and with a decent bar downstairs (at least on the doctors’ side). It may not have served brandy like the old one did (you often needed a shot after seeing the doc in those days), but it had a good cafeteria and, I think it still does – no booze through. Doctors’ orders.

For some reason, the doctors at the Huercal Overa hospital have temporary assignments (or so they tell me). Many an occasion, a whole consultancy is closed down. As for extended waiting times, I’m still waiting for a test ordered last June.

The SAS (Andalusian health authority) is now sending patients to a private hospital up the road in Lorca (Murcia) for operations as the Huercal Overa hospital can’t handle them.

I know, I could go private…

The Andalusian elections will be held on May 17th and the Partido Popular will almost certainly be returned (possibly with an uncomfortable alliance with Vox). The PP has been directly responsible for underfunding the public health service (both here and in Madrid), so it's unlikely things will improve.

... 

The Partido Popular held a meeting in Mojácar last week to celebrate the Andalusian health system without mentioning our nearest hospital, the ailing La Inmaculada in Huercal Overa.

There was a meeting of the world’s main socialist leaders (well, the western ones anyway) in Barcelona late last week, with the presidents or prime ministers of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, South Africa and so on: President Sánchez the host.

As the Madrid leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso said cattily, a world meeting of narco-states. Having offended half of the planet, Ayuso then gave Venezuela’s María Corina Machado a golden gong during that worthy’s brief visit to Spain on Saturday to meet Feijóo and Abascal (Edmundo González, the old boy who either won or didn’t win the Venezuelan election last year and now living in exile in Madrid -at the invitation of Sánchez- couldn’t make the event down to an age-related illness). 

Whether Ayuso’s medal plus a Golden Key donated to the Venezuelan leader by the Mayor of Madrid will both end up in Donald Trump’s massive trophy cabinet along with Corina’s Nobel Peace Prize and so many others remains to be seen.

Another story this past week was the regularization of up to half a million foreigners already living in Spain but without the proper paperwork. Mostly Latin Americans, but, yes, some Muslims and Africans too. Feijóo says he will go through them with a magnifying glass when he becomes president.

Since he can only reach that noble station with the support of Vox, one can believe that he means it.

Indeed, the share-out of the first of the regional elections – Extremadura back in December – has now been resolved following acquiescence over 74 points from Santiago Abascal’s party. Vox takes the vice presidency and two departments: social services and agriculture.

The reason to call the elections last autumn in the first place was to get rid of the Voxxers, but precisely the opposite occurred, and it’s no surprise to see that their benign support didn’t come cheap. Vox continues to deny gender violence and uses broad strokes in its denialist speeches against renewable energies or the green agenda. And then there’s the migrant issue (or ‘institutional racism’ to give it its correct title), where migrants (that includes us guiris as well), will be placed at the back of the queue for the doctor and any other public services guaranteed in the Constitution…

María Guardiola, the president of Extremadura, in 2023: “I cannot allow those who deny gender violence or who are dehumanizing immigrants to enter the government.”

That is precisely what she has just signed, after four months of increasingly frantic negotiations with Vox. As Groucho Marx said: ‘I have my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others’.

Foreigners in Extremadura are just 4.7% - far from the national average of 14%, indeed the total population of the region is shrinking, but the Voxxers are on a roll.

Short of obtaining Spanish nationality, migrants of course don’t have the vote. 

So it’s no burkas in the streets (they are as rare as hen’s teeth in Extremadura, but one has a point to make). As for denying health to the foreigners – will that somehow stop them from sneezing on you? As the journalist Ignacio Escolar says, discriminating against the foreigners won’t make them disappear, it only makes their life harder.

There are two (rather larger) regions facing the same dilemna – whether to bow to the far-right (both Aragón and Castilla y León with PP majorities but needing Vox), and then the Region of Andalucía will be voting on May 17th (the PP is apparently a little short of a full majority there according to the pollsters).

If – let’s call it ‘the Extremadura Experiment’ – shows the PP prepared to submit to Vox on certain points which won’t cost them votes, then this will be the larger plan for when Spain goes to the polls next year. After all, there are no more frontiers against the far-right: ‘I am a democrat who respects election results’, says Feijóo.  

They might be illegal, or bordering on the illegal, but a new PP/Vox government can (and will) change the laws it considers to be in error, granting ‘a national priority’ in social services to those with a DNI card.

Progressive voters must find what inspiration they can from Pedro Sánchez words last week at the Global Progressive Mobilization Summit of world leaders opposed to the policies of Donald Trump in Barcelona: "The far right and its lackeys make a lot of noise, a lot of tweets. But these extremists aren’t shouting because they're winning, they're shouting because they know their time is running out." 

We shall see.   

How can there not be enough homes in Spain? Well, there aren't - at least in the places where people would like to live. The properties for sale (or for rent) have increased in price over the last year by a large amount. Ara says 'Spain, the fourth EU state where housing prices increased the most: more than double the average. Real estate prices in the Spanish state grew 12.9% in the last quarter of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024'. 

From a comment raised at Thoughts from Galicia here: ‘The real reason for Spain’s housing crisis is the massive increase in one-person households. In the country, where 50-60 years ago most people lived in large families crammed together under one roof, the housing market has undergone an enormous transformation in the last decades. That and, of course, speculation, immigration, foreigners buying properties all over’. 

As of 2024 (says Google AI), ‘…there are over 27 million total dwellings in Spain. The total housing stock surpassed this threshold for the first time, reflecting growth despite a noted deficit in new construction in high-demand areas. While the total housing stock is high, roughly 3.8 million homes are classified as empty’. Come to think of it, with the population of Spain at 49.5m people, there are more than enough homes if everyone… doubled up! Of course, everyone wants to live in or near the city, or near their employment, or where the bright lights are. Few of us prefer the lost and empty country which in Spain is so vast.

Perhaps working from home would help, or converting those empty downstairs spaces under the apartment blocks or allowing the availability of land for more prefabricated homes. Yes, everybody wants to live near to, or in the choicest parts of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, and By Golly, there is money to be made.

Another note from Google AI refers to ‘The legacy of 2008: It is estimated that following the 2008 crisis, nearly half a million housing developments were left partially completed or abandoned. Many of these structures remain visible today as concrete "skeletons" in various regions’. These buildings often belong to the ‘Sareb’ (wiki), ‘the bad bank’ (which in my limited experience has little or no interest in selling them).

From El País here: ‘A roof over one's head for speculators: how housing was perverted and inequality skyrocketed. El ladrillo (viz. ‘housing’), once the largest store of wealth on the planet, has become today the main driver of exclusion’. Or you own a house (or several, or many), or you don’t. “Forty-five percent of the population is suffering from the crisis, and more than four out of ten households cannot afford basic expenses. The economy is growing, but poverty is becoming entrenched, and housing is pushing more households into precarious situations,” says Oxfam Intermón. Recent Eurostat data and OECD-based studies place Spain among the countries with the highest rates of housing overburden; in other words, too many citizens spend more than 40% of their net income on rent…’

‘Spain’s Senate has rejected a proposal to build tens of thousands of new public homes in the islands, highlighting the political divide over how to tackle housing shortages in tourist hotspots. The Spanish Senate (under the control of the Partido Popular) has voted against a proposal to launch a large public housing programme of 74,000 affordable public homes in the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands aimed at easing the housing crisis in both archipelagos…’ More at Spanish Property Insight here.

And then, from The Olive Press, there’s this: ‘Spain’s crippling housing crisis is not a market failure but a deliberate ‘political choice’ designed to protect the wealth of property owners, a leading sociologist has warned. Javier Gil, a top researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), claims the country has entered a devastating new era of ‘rentier capitalism’ that is quietly fracturing society…’

And while we are distracted by the squatters, the bank foreclosures and the tenants in arrears (and the insistent propaganda from the alarm companies), the reality is that the laws are stricter than the news-stories suggest and the Ministry of the Interior (the Home Office) reckons there are only about 15,000 homes with illegal squatters, or as LaSexta has: 'Data that debunks alarmist theories about squatting: only 0.05% of homes are occupied'. 

First of all, there must be housing for everyone: not under a bridge or in a bidonville or a camper van or an abandoned shed, but in a reasonably decent home. Then we can concern ourselves with the profiteers. From Google AI here: ‘The right to housing is constitutionally recognized in Spain (Article 47) as a guiding principle, directing public authorities to ensure decent housing and combat speculation. While it is a recognized right, it is not an absolute fundamental right, meaning enforcement depends on public policies and the 2023 Housing Law’. More from Housing Rights Watch here: ‘The State of Housing Rights in Spain’.

News reaches me from Sweden that Per Svensson has died at the age of 92.

Per was responsible for me launching my weekly bulletin ‘Business over Tapas’ (so called because Spaniards like to seal their deals over a beer in the bar downstairs). His own weekly mailings were called ‘News from Spain’ and he passed on to me his subscription list when he retired in 2012.

Per was the leader of a Norwegian communist youth group and was charged with looking after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a good-will visit sometime after 1961. Per told me that the official schedule of speeches and photo opportunities was soon broken as Gagarin wanted to go drinking. He presented Per with a Soviet watch and twenty-five different ways of saying ‘Cheers’ in Russian.

We next hear of Per moving to Spain in 1966 where, he writes, ‘…I became a privileged witness to the great transition from a rotten dictatorship to a modern democracy…’. Per’s first business was in real estate, working out of Tenerife – where experience and tricks learned there set him in good knowledge for his main role, as founder of the Institute of Foreign Property Owners out of Altea in Alicante, a service started in 1982. In 1985 he published a book called ‘Your Home in Spain – before and after the purchase’ which was followed by another 15 editions in six languages. He warned against property-fraud, the time share industry, municipal corruption (we remember the scandal of thousands of homes without building licences sold to unwitting foreigners) and buying off-plan – receiving many threats from local politicians and speculators in the process.

This consumer agency would produce a regular magazine for its many thousands of subscribers with news about property in Spain – the joys and the pitfalls – and included a list of any foreign-sounding name that appeared in the Spanish provincial government bulletins (fines, alerts and so on).

Later Per and a few friends (including me) started Ciudadanos Europeos, a political agitation group pushing to get the vote for foreign residents in Spain. In 1995, we EU citizens were allowed by Felipe González to vote in European elections (whoopee!) but the Minister of the Presidencia, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, managed to stop us from the town hall vote (he thought we would vote for the PP) until 1999.

With this going on, plus meetings in Alicante and Málaga and presentations in Madrid at the Complutense, The Valencian government gave Per an office to run his program, but then de-funded it the day after the local elections of 1999 when its use was no longer important.

I next met up with him on a project to open a retirement village for Norwegians from the city of Bergen, with the idea that elderly Northerners would rather move to Spain if the municipal heath service could somehow finance a retirement home for senior citizens (it would be cheaper than one in Scandinavia – and certainly more enjoyable for the residents). The project eventually fell through.

Per spent his later years between Bulgaria (‘it’s marvellous here, and much cheaper than Spain’, he told me) and Hamburg, before finally returning north to a Swedish nursing home where he died earlier this month.

He leaves behind his wife Heidemarie, two sons and a daughter, and our fond memories.

Madrid, like Barcelona and Valencia, has adopted la gentrificacíon, urban renovation where the rents go up, the old joints are closed down or turned into vanity or impulse stores in a system known to Spanish economists as Premium Mediocre – that’s to say, cheaply expensive.

It sounds swell, looks good and costs a little more, whether it’s a Starbucks outlet, bubble coffee, choosing Uber over a taxi, a bottle of designer water, food that photographs better than it tastes, dragon fruit, stores with boiled pick and mix sweets sold by weight or Pistachio chocolate from Dubai… and of course voting Partido Popular (a few years back, it would have been supporting Ciudadanos, eating mangoes and putting watercress in sandwiches).  

My little romantic village of Mojácar has chosen a similar route, with the beach-bars now demolished and re-built in brick, bicycle lanes along the side of the beach-road, children's playgrounds (also invariably located on the beach), and an artful number of parades, fiestas and celebrations to attract the visitors. We have transformed in a short time from bohemian to bourgeois.

I was criticised by a British woman today while attempting to find a parking spot on the playa, because my car was covered in dust. 'Lady', I said, 'I live in a gravel pit'.

If this all means that the rents have gone up, well that's the point! 

Down past the Castellana, on the bit called Paseo de Recoletos, opposite the Biblioteca Nacional de España, is a famous old watering hole called the Café Gijón, founded in 1888. It’s probably Madrid’s most famous joint, along with the Bar Chicote (perennially popular since 1931 for its cocktails), Viva Madrid (where the hep out-of-towners would meet), the good old Cervecería Alemana (there used to be a sign there: ‘We don’t serve hippies. They don’t like us, and we don’t like them’), and there’s the Café Central (for the best live jazz since 1982). 

I used to enjoy the Café Gijón. It was olde-worlde and had mirrors everywhere, a house bootblack, free newspapers in a wooden frame, elderly waiters in white jackets, and an inevitable clutch of poets or philosophers arguing happily between each other while seated around one of the tables (it didn’t run to a bar). Spain used to do these things so well.

I had a French girlfriend back in 1980 when I was living in Madrid. Walking into the Gijón one day, I saw her sitting by herself at a table next to a window and enjoying a coffee. I ambled over and sat down – Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? I asked (those ten years of French at school stood me well with Huguette).

‘Who the hell are you’, she answered – and as it happened she had a point, since it turned out to be somebody entirely different.

Does that ever happen to you?

There’s a scene in La Colmena (a book about the penniless intellectuals in post-war Franco’s times) where a poet drops something on the floor. When he looks up from below – he finds that his marble-topped table is in fact a reversed tombstone mounted on the ornate metal legs of the slab with the inscription of some departed Spaniard inscribed thereon.

All the tables, he discovers looking around, are the same.

Do you remember those old off-white tables, before the Mahou plastic ones came along?

The years pass. Now the Museo Chicote, with its Guinness Book collection of bottles, has a disc-jockey. The Viva Madrid (1856) still sounds good – although it has turned into a cocktail bar, the Cervecería Alemana (1904) the best for ice-cold beers (rich hippies welcome), now only with table service and the Café Central (where you could see jazz greats like Pedro Iturralde and Jorge Pardo), well, the owner just put the rent up, so the jazz bar closes on April 15th to move to El Ateneo de Madrid, just a few minutes away.

As for the Café Gijón, the very best of them all (where I would meet my father when he was in town), the place was closed last year but has now reopened as a more professional operation.

Let’s see what they say: OKDiario gushes with ‘The historic Café Gijón, located on the Paseo de Recoletos, is embarking on a new chapter after its acquisition by the Majorcan Cappuccino Group, a deal that has generated considerable excitement in the city. After months of closure and renovations, the establishment is reopening with a promise to respect its legacy, but also with a necessary update to adapt to modern times…’

Here’s El Mundo: ‘Madrid's Café Gijón reopens, 'asking' for tips in the US style and targeting international luxury tourists’. It says that ‘…The lively conversations that used to fill the afternoons have given way to an offering geared towards high-spending tourists, in which traditional dishes have been replaced by an international menu’.

The bill, when you ask for it, comes with ‘a suggested gratuity’ of 10 or 15% on top.

Now, here in Spain – until yesterday at least – we don’t tip. The staff’s emolument is included in the bill. Half the time, if you do leave the change (a few coins, not more), the boss gets to keep it anyway.

The co-official languages of Spain are a mess.

Firstly – euskara is spoken by nobody outside the three Basque provinces plus  neighbouring Navarra (the Basques think that Pamplona should be their capital, but are stuck with Vitoria, or Vitoria-Gasteiz to be pedantic, which is at least in the right geographical location). All Basques will (and for practical reasons must) speak Spanish. You might get a word or two in Euskara to make the point, but, if nobody understands…

Then there’s galego, a mix of Portuguese and Spanish. There’s aragonés – or fabla – as well (it’s close to extinction apparently). Over to the East, the Catalans like to speak catalán (unless they live in Valencia, where it’s called valenciano). In Valencia, normally Partido Popular territory, they prefer to speak Spanish anyway, and they would no doubt prefer it if I said ‘castellano’.  Indeed, castellano is more like the King’s English; it’s best spoken in Valladolid, while worst savaged in Cádiz.

Catalán has so much baggage, what with that Independence thing, that Miriam Nogueras, the parliamentary spokesperson for Junts del Catalunya, insists on making all her presentations in that language. Since nobody else in las cortes either likes her or cares what she is saying, few deputies bother to plug a pinganillo into their ear for the translation...

Since we got on this subject, I would suggest that el inglés is probably the fourth-spoken idioma in Spain – rising to second place during the summer months.

Having trodden on more than a few toes with the foregoing, I’ll note here that my friend José Antonio Sierra (who founded the Spanish Cultural Institute in Dublin, and served as Director and Cultural Manager of the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin for many years) has been campaigning in Andalucía to get the escuelas oficiales de idiomas, who merrily teach English, French and German, to offer courses in Spain’s minority languages, so far without success.

Easter Week is here and for once the weather is on its best behaviour. Perhaps a few showers up there in Galicia (they seem to enjoy them), but warm and sunny for the rest of Spain.

Which means tourists, visitors, families and an agreeable amount of mayhem and hullabaloo. 

Those city folk who can trace the heritage of a far-off beginning in some abandoned pueblo will be back for a few days, making a fuss of the old people who stayed behind, proudly parking their car in the street which used to be more familiar with donkeys than with SUVs. The old kitchen with the fire lit and an agreeable smell of chicken and sausage (bought yesterday at El Corte Inglés) floats out the door where the menfolk are doing their best to appreciate some home-made wine, el vino casero. It’s rough but it’s honest.  

But most of Spain, plus a generous number of foreign visitors (they’ve wisely cancelled their hols in Turkey or Cyprus and decided on the old standby of España once again) are now on the beach, getting their first rays since last summer.

The locals are performing their processions, La Virgen María is on the move, and the town band is tootling along behind her, providing melancholic or joyous melodies as demanded. Jesús may be carried solemnly from the church once around the square no touchies, and followed by a clutch of old girls in black, but most of us are in the bars, the restaurants and the souvenir shops (which have stayed open late, just for you).

Is Easter a religious or a pagan holiday? Who knows and, with some small but no doubt vocal exception, who cares? 

The cities are another thing again. More crowds taking the week off work, milling about with their perambulators, and then there are the penitents, the nazarenos, often dressed in capirotes (those sinister outfits with the robes and pointy heads) marching down the side streets in columns, briefly posing for the cameras.

Easter is fun. There are special cakes at the bakery – including those wonderful torrijas soaked in milk, egg and sugar then fried (or with sweet wine instead of the milk): it’s a sort of jolly version of French toast, or if your generosity stretches far enough, the Spanish answer to the British hot cross bun.

It’s now the start of the season, and this year Spain is certain to hit its goal of a hundred million foreign tourists (after all, apart from France, where else can they go?). Once the Semana Santa is over, and before the bacchanalia really takes hold, I might be just about able to zip down to the supermarket (and the library) to load up on provisions for the inevitable summer onslaught.

My shopping list reads: beer, bangers and books.

For sure, it’s gonna be a hot one.  

There are two kinds of energy – one that is mined from the earth and the other which comes from the skies (or the lakes). The first is expensive to obtain, is (eventually) limited in supply and is a contaminant.

The other is wind, sun and water: limitless, free and easily harvested.

For a while there, the solar and wind energy were considered such a threat to the oil industry (and its taxes) that the PP government of Mariano Rajoy came up with a ‘Sun Tax’ (2015 – 2018) to disincentivise the solar industry. It was aimed at consumers who would be harvesting their own energy (principally from solar panels) and thus depriving the power company of its due. A bit like growing one’s own tomatoes but still having to pay a levy to the supermarket. Plus, of course, handing over the ones you didn’t eat. 

Silly, really, with all the sun we have here. We read: Spain typically receives over 2,500 to over 3,000 hours of sun annually, while Germany averages around 1,600 to 2,000 hours, and the UK generally receives 1,300 to 1,500 hours.

Back in 2012, Germany’s "Energiewende" (energy transition) and consistent feed-in tariffs spurred massive solar installations, making it the European market leader. The country had more solar power than Spain, despite their cloudy skies. Indeed, it still does today.

Here in Spain, we have plenty of clean energy, but oddly, we are still heavily reliant on oil.

Which has gone up thanks to its scarcity – for reasons to do with faulty politics elsewhere.

Then, the Government steps in to give subsidies, to lower the tax on gasoline from 21 to 10%, and help the farmers, the fishermen and certain other sectors. 

Faced with every oil crisis, says journalist Ignacio Escolar, Spain repeats the same formula: fuel discounts we don't have, paid for with public money we don't have to spare. It's a populist, ineffective, and regressive recipe. A misguided idea that has been backfiring for half a century.

Oil embargos or suddenly heightened prices (usually something to do with middle eastern aggression) are resolved in Spain with a desperate plan to avoid unpopular increases at the pump, meaning discounts which – along the way – would negatively affect Spain’s balance of payments. Consumption therefore remains unchanged, while the evidence to switch to clean fuels (such as electric vehicles) is largely ignored. Spain (normally speaking) has the second lowest taxes on petrol in Europe after Bulgaria – although it’s true that the base price for petrol and diesel varies slightly between countries.

As for electric vehicles, Spain can claim about 5.4% of its fleet to be fully electric (against Germany at 18.4%). ‘Oh, but they take so long to charge up’, you might say. However, it’s an industry that’s changing fast. The latest BYD Flash Charging stations available in China now take five minutes for a full charge.    

Having one’s own solar energy panels, says some bright spark, is a call for independence (imagine if Cuba was thus prepared). Having the entire country run on redeemable energy (if and when) is even more so. Neither coal nor oil to be torn from Mother Earth and turned – in part – into smoke, fumes and toxic pollution. Furthermore, a country like Spain with no domestic oil or gas production, can only keep its imports down with clean energy alternatives.

Today, Spain produces cheaper electricity thanks to renewables, which account for almost 60% of production. “Last Saturday, the price of a megawatt-hour in Spain was 14 euros, compared to more than 100 in Italy, Germany, or France,” boasted Pedro Sánchez at his press conference last week. “Spain is better prepared than almost any other country in our region for this energy shock,” he added. This is only half true.

In renewable electricity production, we have done our homework. Spain gets very good marks. However, in transportation, the failure is absolute.

Nobody wants to take such an unpopular measure as raising gasoline or diesel prices – or allowing them to rise. Electricity in Spain—the wholesale price—is among the cheapest in Europe. There are times, almost every week, when renewable energy production exceeds total demand. And yet, here we are: subsidizing energy we don't have through taxes, instead of investing in the energy we have in surplus.