THE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS HOME

After a pleasant morning, I came into the outskirts of Pola de Siero,  a largeish town.  From the little parkette with sweet modern statues at the outskirts of town, I could see the charming spires of the local church, of which I took a picture.  I had to compose that picture carefully to leave out abandoned buildings covered with grafitti, empty storefronts, and signs offering buildings for rent or sale.  I knew that the unemployment rate was high, and that there were rumblings about Spain's financial stability, but here in Pola was the physical evidence.  

The town seemed to have lost whatever charm it might have had.  Apart from the church most of the buildings looked like they were built in the 1960's; the white brick ones, and the 1980's; the white elephants.  What should have been the town centre was just faceless storefronts.  I decided to go down one block to see if there was a more happening thoroughfare than the one down which the Camino was going.  Nothing

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I wondered what had happened to the medieval town. I've tried to find out since,  but all I can discover is that Pola was a  little market town, with some meat packing plants.  It seems to have been a victim of progress throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the "out with the old and in with the new" mentality that has ruined towns everywhere.  Now, in the face of economic insecurity it is slipping back into obscurity.  I heard the other day on the news that the unemployment rate for Spanish young people is 50%.  That's pretty sad, but  helps to explain the anarchist grafitti and the boarded up shops.

The rest of the day looked like it would offer more of the same.  There was a little stretch of country, then the town of Colloto, and then suburbs and industrial parks and highway crossings all the way to Oviedo.  And here, right in front of me, was the bus station, which had a coffee shop, and I was hungry.  And it was pouring.  All of these factors combined to make my decision for me. Sure,  I had wanted to see the encampment of gitanos, Spanish gypsies, on the outskirts of Colloto, but I wanted to stay warm and dry and not walking on pavement through soul-destroying concrete landscapes even more.

Once again, I was happy I chose to take the bus.  I had a nice conversation in English, Spanish, and French with a young Senegalese man who came to Spain as a fisher but was now a butcher.  He hadn't wanted to leave Senegal but there was nothing there for him.  I asked him why he hadn't gone to France, where his native tongue was spoken.  Papers were too difficult to get, he said.  I suppose he was one of the reasons that Spanish youth employment was so high.   

As we went along the highway past roadworks and big box stores, the same route that the Camino followed, I could see that I wasn't missing much by not walking.  Later in the year I heard that the new road had cut the Camino entirely and that there was now no way to get to Oviedo without taking public transport.  I was just ahead of the curve, I guess.