Soup Kitchens are hopping in Spain

[Joanne98]

Prosperous Spanish city falls victim to hard timesExpo host Zaragoza enjoyed enviable growth in the boom years. Now the unemployed are queuing at soup kitchens, reports Giles Tremlett

In his bar overlooking the Ebro river as it rushed beneath the elegant footbridge designed by the renowned architect Zaha Hadid, Rafael Moreno glumly surveyed the handful of customers picking at their lunchtime food.

"We have already had to lay people off," he said. "They were meant to start building offices here, but I can't see it happening any time soon. This crisis is going to last."

Moreno's bar, Bocados, opened last year with riotous success amid the euphoria of Zaragoza's international Expo fair. The city was booming, and so was Spain. It was the country that was creating most jobs and attracting most immigrants in Europe and it was celebrating its fifteenth consecutive year of economic growth.

Now the empty, rubbish-strewn Expo site, with its pavilions half-gutted and Hadid's expensive bridge fenced off to the public, is a symbol of Spain's precipitous fall from a bricks-and-mortar boom to a bust that has given it the developed world's highest unemployment.

In a country destroying jobs at a breathtaking rhythm, once flourishing Zaragoza and the region around it is declining even faster than the national average - with unemployment up 75% in a year. The shock has already sent protesters on to the city's streets in their tens of thousands. "If this isn't fixed: Strike! Strike! Strike!", they chanted at a recent rally.

With Spain's property developers queuing up to file for bankruptcy and employees at a local General Motors factory waiting to discover whether their jobs will survive a global restructuring plan to be announced this week, the mood becomes bleaker by the day.

Similar stories are being told across recession-hit Spain, with economists predicting that unemployment will rise from its present level of 14% to 20% by the end of the year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/15/zaragoza-spain-economy

[davidwparker]

1. How's globalization working out for everybody? n/t