Are There Enough Homes For Us All?

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, nearlyhalf 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’.

The Madrid Cafés and Bars

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.

Per Svensson Has Died

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.

Can You Speak Up a Bit

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 unfortunately has so much baggage, what with the 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 (let's have a party)

 

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.  

Döner Kebab

I see we have been recently blessed with an alarming number of Döner Kebab outlets locally. My little Shangri-La has six (!) of them and Turre, the pueblo up the road, has another three. Next door Garrucha Port has eight of them (who needs fish?).

Indeed, the whole of Spain appears to be stiff with them.  

Is this the end of the late night pizza and the bocadillo filled with battered squid rings?

I checked with Google, which shrugged its shoulders helplessly. In Germany, there are 16,000 of them. Queues stretching around the block. In Spain, ¿quien sabe?

Another answer from Google says: 'Kebabs can be a healthy, high-protein meal, particularly when choosing grilled chicken or lean meat skewers served with vegetables and pita. However, commercial döner kebabs are often high in saturated fat and sodium, potentially exceeding daily allowances. Healthiness depends on meat quality, portion size, and sauce choices'. 

The BBC is equally catty: '...Last year food scientists for Hampshire county council found that döner kebabs were the fattiest takeaways. One contained 140g of fat, twice the maximum daily allowance for women, and the calorific equivalent to a wine glass of cooking oil. And 60% of the kebabs tested were high in trans fat, which raises cholesterol levels...'

Later it says: 'Research by the UK's Food Standards Agency in 2006 found that 18.5% of döner takeaways posed a "significant" threat to public health, and 0.8% posed an "imminent" threat...'

But that was in England twenty years ago. What about Spain in 2026?

Are they worth a try?

No doubt a good one is a culinary delight, especially with that yummy yoghurt sauce and some salad - however I imagine that restauranteurs blinded by the bright lights of commerce might find it easy to, er, cut corners. 

The last one I had was around 40 years ago. It was pretty tasty as I recall.

It's time I had another go. Maybe wash it down with a beer. 

But which one of them all is the very best? I suspect that I am only going to risk it the one time...