It's an under-developed region where, as in so much of euro-bolstered southern Europe, the biggest economic player is the state. The landscape is spectacular: the Sierra Nevada with a few peaks of snow even in mid-May towering above rolling hillsides of olives, oranges and wheat. But there's a global olive oil crisis: the regional government had to inject 62m euros into olive oil cooperatives to get them through the collapse in prices. The regional unemployment rate is 30% and many farm labourers feel trapped by the current crisis, which, says Lola Alvarez, is just an intensification of a land crisis which is "always there". Lola is a union organiser at Somonte, a farm abandoned as unworkable three years ago which has now been squatted by upwards of 50 people who are trying to revive it as an eco-farm. The directions to Somonte are "drive to a certain kilometre marker and look for the flags". The flags, of course, display the face of Che Guevara. It's early, so the occupiers - who sleep nose to toe on the floor of two tiny farm buildings - are still stumbling into the ritual of black coffee and roll ups that attends all occupy protests. Some are farm labourers, some itinerant anarchists, some both. "Before the crisis, because of low pay on the land, the majority of farm workers switched to the construction sector. Their jobs were taken by migrants, and also by mechanisation. Now construction has collapsed there's very little work on the land." Spain, so far, is nowhere near as fractious as Greece. Whereas in Greece, after two years of rioting and political incompetence, you got the rise of "anomic breakdown" - social rootlessness and hopelessness - Spain has done the opposite: people have clung to their families, their village roots, their religion (and their secondary religion which is football) - or in the case of the young they have formed placid protest camps.
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