All this is real, but arguably entirely superficial. You take your second glance and there is another reality. Everywhere there are men in cheap clothes, chatting by fountains or lingering long over one drink. (They must love us as consumers: when we've consumed, we buy something else!) Look again at the new industrial and commercial development along the main road and you realise it is entirely inactive. The big tractors have been marshalled, not to tilth the land under the trees, but to protest against declining subsidies. There is graffiti everywhere. The estate agents in the charming hill town are offering a four-bedroom apartment for 40,000 euros. People do not look hungry, but the charities in Malaga feed up to a thousand people every night. The socialist government of Andalucia has fallen foul of almost all economic opinion by passing a law to protect domestic properties from foreclosure, in effect confiscating them from the banks. The intense modernisation, the great catching up, longed for and dreaded for centuries, has come at a terrifying cost. Adult unemployment is 37 per cent; the rate for those under 25 is over 60 per cent. Even taking into account the observation that Spanish unemployment figures have always hidden casual work and been higher than those in most other countries, these are incredible figures. A higher proportion of the population is unemployed in contemporary Andalucia than was the case almost anywhere in Europe in the Great Depression.

There were the "Regional Funds" and the "Common Agricultural Policy", transforming the land with their lovely new roads and their shiny new tractors. Then came the euro. ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.") So what happens now? For all the graffiti and the demonstrations I do not sense any revolutionary spirit. I know that in saying this I risk being like the traveller who thought on his visit to France in 1788 that Louis XVI was doing just fine, but I think Spaniards probably accept their current political arrangements to a degree unprecedented in their modern history. Sadly, they have exchanged an old and familiar form of poverty for a new one, the consequences of which are unknown. Mr. Micawber suggested that the greater determinant of human happiness is not the level of prosperity, but its sustainability and I think of him when I read about the suicides of people who had once thought themselves well off, including a British "ex-pat" family of three with medical problems they could not afford to solve who killed themselves while we were there.