Washington Irving (who has two memorials in the Alhambra: a statue and a fountain) has a typically flowery passage in which he says that if you give an Andalucian bread, wine, garlic and a guitar, he considers himself an hidalgo and needs for nothing more even though he is dressed in rags. The pride and self-sufficiency of the southern peasant is a constant theme of such writing in English: five generations later Boyd constantly warned that economic growth and industry were irrelevant to southern Spanish needs and would prove corrosive to Andalucian culture. It was ironically and in the end, Generalissimo Franco, the symbol of tradition for many, who decided to put Spain on the road to modernisation in 1957. When he announced the introduction of a (sort of ) constitution in 1966, he listed the traditional Spanish virtues, but then added a note on the vices of the country:

Let Spaniards remember that every country is haunted by its demons, which are different for each one. Those of Spain are by name: Spirit of Anarchy, Negative Criticism, Lack of Solidarity between Men, Extremism and Mutual Emnity . . .

Quite an indictment from a patriotic leader, and one that he used to suggest that the limits of democracy in Spain were more constricting than in other European countries. But,if one accepted the lists of Spanish vices and virtues what would you expect to happen now? When you see a Spanish family out together, under the trees of a restaurant in a square, they seem to have a capacity for collective contentment and tradition in excess of that in other countries. Perhaps they can survive the new forms of poverty and deprivation. But 60 per cent youth unemployment, put alongside a history of violence and the new technological addiction . . . perhaps they can't.

It was the pretty young lady who worked for the hotel who pointed out that the lemon on the tree above my head was ripe and of good quality and would enhance my gintonic. In a flash, like Newton before me, I had solved a major problem by the contemplation of fruit on a tree. All you need to do to solve Andalucia's unemployment problem was to ban the use of mechanical devices for the picking of olives and almonds. Olives were traditionally picked either ordenaňdo ("milking" them with the hands) or vareando (hitting them with just the right force with a stick). There are now thousands of square miles covered in olives at about three dozen trees to the acre. Andalucians could again become bands of agricultural labourers, roaming the countryside, with spoons to eat from the communal pot prepared by the farmers wife and guitars to accompany their singing under the moon at night before they retired into the barn for a good night's sleep. The Luddite Solution: it doesn't have a great historical record, but right now it seems as least as plausible as anything else.