In the wake of the global economic crisis of 2007-08, Spain experienced a series of recessions that pushed its unemployment rate to the highest level in the whole European Union! When I walked El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in the spring of 2012, Spanish unemployment was at 23%! Nearly half of all Spanish workers under 25 were out of work! So, when Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, proposed a new austerity reform that made huge cuts (€27 billion) to healthcare and education, it really made people mad!

So how did this happen? Spain’s central and regional governments had spent a lot of money developing their country’s infrastructure, and when the global housing bubble burst in 2008, Spain found itself heavily in debt with no easy way to repay it! Along with Greece, Italy, and Portugal, Spain asked the rest of the European Union for a bailout; otherwise, it would have to leave the eurozone and potentially put the European economy in chaos! After all, if one country leaves the euro, investors would likely start pulling out of Europe entirely, and then one fifth of global trade becomes super uncertain! Stronger economies, like the German one, offered to help their beleaguered brethren, but only if they promised to shape up and spend less so this kind of scenario would never happen again. That’s where the austerity measures came in.

Protests erupted across the country. 900,000 people protested in Madrid, and 800,000 protested in Barcelona! In the latter city, protestors set fire to garbage bins and a Starbucks! At some school protests, young students were even arrested by the police! Things were tamer when I walked into Santiago de Compostela, but there were still plenty of folks out to protest these austerity measures! Factories, public transportation, and even news outlets shut down for the day, and I was really nervous about transportation strikes keeping me from getting home!

Since then, Spain has been refinancing and restructuring its banking system, and for now, it seems to be pulling through! In 2013, it came out of a two-year recession, and as of late 2014, has been back in the black! Let’s hope it keeps up that trend!