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Next week we’ll be on the Camino de Santiago – the pilgrimage route to the supposed tomb of St James in the granite city of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain – myself, Gaby and Fernando, he of the cork strippers (blog No. 2 in this series). Knowing I’m alone at the moment – Gaby in London – Fernando telephones and proposes a walk. He’s a great walker and cyclist and evidently thinks I need honing up before the long distance tramping of the pilgrimage route. Like Woody Allen, I had already been practising on my own but I accepted the invitation with alacrity. From his home village, we climbed steadily uphill for most of two hours. From olives into scrub into chestnut woods, stippled with sun and shadow, and into a thin forest of Pyrenean oak with huge views of Extremadura spreading below. It was election day tomorrow – municipal and regional governments only – and we fell to discussing village politics. A friend in Fuente Fria has been arguing that it does’t matter who rules the town hall – whether the conservative PP, the so-called Popular Party, or their decades-long rivals, PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. ‘It certainly does matter’, says Fernando. ‘They apply different methods. Haven’t you noticed the parties sent out from the town hall to clear the undergrowth in the pine-forests?’ Well, yes, and with a most supportive eye. Forest fire is the great scourge round here, at least in summer, given the acreage of pine with which we are afflicted in some areas, and clearing the woods out is obviously a wise precaution. ‘You may think the working parties sit around a lot, not doing very much’, says Fernando. ‘But they are useful, however you look at. The town hall in the case will undoubtedly be socialist and trying to put some money into the pockets of the unemployed. You can’t object to that, because quite apart from the difficulties of all the people out of work , we do need money to circulate in the villages or else the shops will die. Etcetera, etcera. IN PP villages they are much more likely to bring in contractors. The company signs up to do a particular acreage, and they usually do it quickly and well. They want to get on to the next job. But it doesn’t offer much help to the ordinary person.’ For me, this is a rerun of the public/private debate in the UK in the ’80’s, often fought out over rubbish clearance, but it becomes so visible, so easily comprehensible among the villages. Another thing of a political nature is fairly obvious in the villages, and one of the reasons the sierra is such a pleasant place to be. That’s the absence of big landowers, the apparent equality among people, whether in PSOE or PP villages. ‘Ah’, says Fernando after we have climbed a little higher, out into open sun, both of us sweating a good deal, ‘it wasn’t always like this’. He recalls the old days when, in the south of Extremadura especially, there really were huge estates which ruled the roost and kept the landless in a kind of serfdom. These estates were called latifundios and their existence has been one of the major issues of Spain’s modern history. ‘We had latifundios here too, in the sierra, only they were invisible. The property divisions were just the same as they are now, lots of tiny patches. Only some families owned huge numbers of them and others had none at all. So the people who had none worked for the people who had many.’ He reels off the names from his own village – the Corderos, the Valientes and another family whom we both know well, still in the village, living like ordinary folk and very charming, too. As he pronounces the names, the families sound to my ear like Sicilian nobility. ‘What has happened since the Civil War is that they have all sold off, bit by bit. Give or take a little. Yes, we are all small proprietors now’. Now that it doesn’t matter, I think wryly. Now that land is no longer the key to fortune and much of it in the sierra lies unprofitable, abandoned. It is energetic people like Fernando and his family who keep their huertas – their garden plots – going. But the melting away of the old class divisions is certainly a big plus. As always mention of the civil war has sent our minds off on an excursion into the past and we fall to discussing the huge success of the post-war irrigation scheme in southern Extremadura, along the River Guadiana, still called the Plan Badajoz. That’s the name of the provincial capital of the area and it’s a lifesaver to a region that has no industry you can apply the name to. The Plan Badajoz has brought in rice and tomato growing, peppers. All sorts of hot country produce now comes off the land and goes to market, not to mention the tobacco that came, then went again, when EU subsidies were stopped: and none too soon. Franco usually gets the credit for the economic and social revolution along the Guadiana, and the great benefit it brings to southern Extremadura, once so poverty-stricken, but Fernando and I remember this morning how the scheme was originally put forward not by Franco and his henchmen but by the pre-war Republican government, defeated in the civil war. I recall it particularly, in a personal kind of way, because the minister responsible was a former journalist, the interesting and courageous Indalecio Prieto. Well done Indalecio Prieto, well done the Republic. And thank you Fernando for a fine walk, with plenty of interesting talk.