“The reality,” concedes banker Enrique Casanueva after listing Spain’s advantages in the face of a deepening global financial crisis, “is that this economy has grown a lot because we have built lots of houses.”
Hundreds of thousands of those houses – in what seemed a virtuous circle, their construction was both a cause and an effect of Spain’s rapid growth – now lie empty and unsold along the coast and on the fringes of big cities. The residential property market has crashed, and the worst-hit developers are bankrupt. Unemployment has surpassed 11 per cent of the workforce and is rising fast.
