The struggle of unemployed Spanish farm labourers continues to grab global headlines. First with the enterprising supermarket sweeps led by the maverick "Robin Hood mayor", Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, and this week with the mass occupation of the Palacio de Moratalla, owned by the Duke of Segorbe. "We're here to denounce a social class that leaves such places to waste," proclaimed Diego Cañamero, leader of the Andalusian Union of Workers – the duke was not there to hear him say it, being in one of his other homes, 60 miles away.
The duke, like many of the region's titled landowners, receives farm subsidies from the EU for his vast expanses of land, irrespective of whether anything is grown on it – meanwhile, rural poverty and unemployment soar ever higher. While the eurozone crisis, Rajoy's austerity measures, and the collapse of the construction industry on the Andalusian coast have brought it into sharp focus, the struggle for land goes back centuries in Spain. Some of the most notorious examples include the ill-fated Asturias Rising in 1934, in which 1,335 people were killed, and the election of a Spanish Federal Republic in 1873, a regime of radical decentralisation, which saw villages proclaim independence from the state and begin to carve up the large estates of the nobles for farming.
