Spanish views from a small town

Yesterday was a damp, dull, grey day, with incessant rain from morning to night. Today has some clouds and showers hanging about, but the cloud canopy is higher, with smidgens of blue, and an occasional ray of sun. Tomorrow is a regional holiday, Día das Letras Galegas, Day of Galician Literature. So, between today and tomorrow, two Sundays. Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the 15-M movement. In Spain, we have the custom to label a day to remember in the contemporary history books, with the number and the first letter of the month. So, 9/11 in the US is 11-S here. And 15-M was the 15th of May of 2011, when grassroots movements converged on Madrid. There were protests and marches across all of Spain that day, against the austerity imposed in the wake of the crisis of 2008, and the surprise camp-outs imposed themselves on dozens of Spanish cities. But the two cities where it transcended beyond a mere protest were Barcelona and, memorably, Madrid.   The protests came about ...

Five years ago today, 15th May, 2011, there was a protest in Madrid's Puerta del Sol. It was organized by different associations that had gotten together to protest against the mishandling of the economic crisis, imposed austerity, loss of workers' rights, the bailout of corrupt banks with public money, and the entrenched corruption in politics. It was a large march, about twenty thousand estimated protestors, and that night about forty of them decided to hunker down in Puerta del Sol, after the march had disbanded. They said they weren't moving until things were fixed. Unfortunately, the police had other things in mind, and ran them from the square in the early morning, detaining around twenty of them. But indignation was running high - against the politicians, against the police, against the banks, and against the injustices caused by the crisis. On the seventeenth, people were back in Puerta del Sol, this time to camp out and stay the night. By the next day the number ...