16 Oct 2012

Spain between Columbus and a hard place

I am in Cadiz. This gorgeous fortified peninsular port, some 3,000 years old – Spain’s great lookout on the blue Atlantic. No wonder Columbus set sail from here. Logic dictated there had to be something beyond the perfect horizontal skyline.

The Poniente tower, on the south west corner of the vast and gracious cathedral, gazes high up over a spectacular 360 degree view of the world, crying out for empire.


Even now the container stacks in the harbour speak of the Americas.

But the stacks are down, and the boom-time largesse that spawned work on a vast bridge to connect the trade more efficiently with the mainland is very apparently at a standstill.

The bridge spurts a confident start across five spans, with stumps of supports for half a dozen more. But the two giant suspension pylons stand naked, obelisks to a riskier age than even Columbus knew.

The last built span spits a great 300 foot tongue of concrete out across the water, thirsting for the waiting pylon beyond. The bridge stands as a crazy symbol of Spain‘s part in capitalism’s disgraceful boom.

Ribbons of dwellings

Had God taken a packet of cornflakes and shaken it out along the coastline around Cadiz, and had those flakes fallen as condominiums and row upon row of densely packed two-storey white beach houses, then this is what Spain’s Atlantic coast now looks like.

Ribbons of perhaps 50 dwellings deep now wall the breath-taking, wide, white beaches and dunes along the ocean. A third of them are for sale.

Yet within these sudden developments a green golfing “paradise” sustains, with vast BMWs, Porsche tanks, and Mercedes, jamming the car parks.  For some here, life goes on. For others it has either stopped, or gone into reverse.

Welcome to Europe’s fringes. It doesn’t look as dangerous as Greece but it feels as bust. And, like Greece, Spain is a gateway, an affected gateway, feeling the heat of the narrow strip south of here that represents the closest north Africa comes to licking Europe’s shores.

Victims of Libya’s overspill

Libya lies beyond to the east and south, in turmoil still; romantic desert Mali, Niger, and Mauritania still farther south, now the victims of Libya’s overspill. One stands in Cadiz on the stone battlements and thinks about Columbus and the relative purity of his age.

But then the eye is drawn to the stilled cranes, the mothballed apparatus of construction, and you wonder what great feet of courage and imagination will put this right?

Did we ever dream that Columbus’s great endeavour would be so dwarfed by failure on this scale?

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