On our way to Guadalajara, we passed one depopulated village after another. Some were bombed out and lay in ruins. Others were brand new and cute. Yet they were all mostly or completely empty.
“Todo por la patria” said a large sign on a military-style building we passed. It was the most cheerful thing we saw in a landscape devoid of people.
Finally, we approached the taxi driver’s village. It was one of the housing projects built right before the Great Recession of 2009. Luxury single-family homes with swimming pools in the middle of absolute nowhere and with no infrastructure to support family life. The proliferation of these construction projects that were used as money-laundering and corruption schemes contributed to the severity of the economic crisis in Spain.
The luxury housing projects had stood empty for years but later people like José, the driver I was pursuing, started buying them. He wouldn’t be able to afford housing in Madrid, but as a driver by profession who chooses his hours of work and has no children, he can live far out and drive into the city to work.
As we entered the village, we saw a gigantic rainbow – the biggest I’ve ever seen – over the few houses that constitute the settlement and a Ukrainian flag on the hill over the village. The rainbow and the utterly unexpected flag added to the surreal nature of our hunt for a phone in the midst of rural Spain. In the US you can come across a Ukrainian flag pretty much anywhere but in Spain all we have seen is an overwhelming presence of LGBT and Palestinian flags. Some buildings are pretty much wrapped in the inclusive rainbow flag making one think that protesting too much is as suspicious as it’s ever been.
[To be continued…]
Clarissa's Blog 
The bridges to nowhere. I would suspect this socialist (or crony capitalist) housing has a much to do with the rental affordability crisis as airbnbs.
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This sounds like a crony capitalist thing to me if the housing was meant to be high end. There are plenty of abandoned high-end housing developments from the 2008 crash in the US if you go to the right places. My in-laws live close to one, there is a whole hillside a few miles from them with dozens and dozens of enormous houses in various states of construction. A handful look to be nearly complete, some have all the walls, but no rooves, some have just foundations. I believe there was supposed to be a golf course at the bottom of the big hill, but that didn’t happen after the housing development crashed. I’m sure many millions were spent on what is there, and it’s all been sitting there going to ruin for 15ish years. The county this is in has a local population that is very poor and a lot of wealthy retired people who move there for the weather. The giant houses were supposed to attract more wealthy retired people, but that didn’t work out. Many of the poor locals live in old, substandard housing, but that money got wasted on a bunch of half-finished giant houses that no one wanted to buy. Imagine if that money had been invested in more modest houses and ordinary apartment buildings that could have been a step-up for some of the local population.
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