“Their enormous efforts built great cities. Today no one cares for them and they have nowhere to live”

At the start of the 19th century, Spain experienced a process of modernization that neighbouring countries had already undergone decades before. The demographic old regime of high mortality was finally in the past and hygiene improvements brought an increase in life expectancy. Strong population growth exhausted the country’s economic resources.

Demographic growth and the unequal distribution of land in a predominantly agricultural society stimulated migration. Spaniards from the north and the Atlantic coast went above all to America, with Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay as the main destinations. Along the Mediterranean, Algeria was the preferred target. Inequality also triggered migration from the countryside to the cities, where workers were needed for the great infrastructure projects of urban expansions, subways, and tram lines that were being undertaken to which the image shown here refers.

If in 1900, 66 per cent of the population worked in agriculture, in 1930 it had fallen to 45.5 per cent, an important structural change in the active population towards industry and services. Spain was still a largely rural country but the transformation that had taken place in thirty years was very important. When the economic crisis that began in 1929 cut off trans-Atlantic migration, internal movement increased significantly.

The crisis of the 1930s upset this delicate equilibrium. The new Republic arrived at a moment when Europe was facing severe economic difficulties, with runaway unemployment in Germany and the freezing of capital flows on the continent. Although it was less severe in Spain, blockages in the banking sector affected construction, where most people who had migrated from the countryside to the cities worked. Faced with unemployment, many returned to their gone village, where the problems of land ownership remained to be resolved. Many others remained in the cities, where they found that housing problems only got worse. Many, homeless and without work, were condemned to poverty. All this fed a pressure cooker of hardship that fed into social revolts.

FMP