KEY POINTS:
In his bar overlooking the Ebro River as it rushed beneath the elegant Zaha Hadid-designed footbridge, Rafael Moreno glumly surveyed the handful of customers picking at their lunch.
"We have already had to lay people off," he said. "They were meant to start building offices here,
but I can't see it happening any time soon.
"This crisis is going to last."
Moreno's bar, Bocados, opened last year with riotous success amid the euphoria of Zaragoza's international Expo fair. The city was booming, and so was Spain. It was the country that was creating most jobs and attracting most immigrants in Europe and it was celebrating its 15th consecutive year of economic growth.
Now the empty, rubbish-strewn Expo site, with its pavilions half-gutted and Hadid's expensive bridge fenced off to the public, is a symbol of Spain's plunge from a bricks-and-mortar boom to a bust that has given it the developed world's highest rate of unemployment.
In a country destroying jobs at a breathtaking pace, Zaragoza and the region around it is declining even faster than the national average - with unemployment up 75 per cent in a year. The shock has already sent protesters on to the city's streets in their tens of thousands.
With Spain's property developers queuing to file for bankruptcy and a local General Motors factory waiting to hear if it will survive a global restructuring plan to be announced this week, the mood becomes bleaker by the day.
Similar stories are being told across recession-hit Spain, with economists predicting unemployment will rise from its present level of 13 per cent to 20 per cent by the end of the year.
"I've got one more month's work and then no idea what will happen," said Angel Lopez, an electrician who came to Zaragoza to help build the Expo pavilions and hotels. "I will go abroad if I have to. No one is going to build here any more."
Spain's construction sector, fuelled by cheap credit both for Spaniards and for foreigners seeking holiday homes, had swollen to twice the size of that in other countries. As the bubble grew, building sites sucked in unskilled workers, helping to multiply its immigrant population eightfold in 10 years and encouraging young people to swap school for easy money.
A property crash, already on its way before the global financial meltdown started, has sent those workers spilling into the dole queues.
Behind them they have left plunging property prices and a stock of empty, unsold new homes that is now close to 1.5 million.
The new unemployed are now dragging everyone from bank tellers to waitresses behind them.
Already in Zaragoza, and elsewhere, they are talking of "the new poor".
Workers at a soup kitchen which can feed 122 people at a time said things were becoming dramatically worse.
"In November we started handing out food in bags because we could not get everyone into the dining room," said social worker Lucia Capilla. "Yesterday we had to hand out 30 bags."
Charity workers blame a creaking social support system and the mortgages taken out to buy overpriced houses for the emergence of a new kind of poverty. Spain's 10 per cent of immigrants cannot turn to family for support - the traditional Spanish crutch at times of crisis.
HARDEST HIT
* Spain entered its first recession in 15 years, after the economy contracted 1 per cent in the fourth quarter.
* After a debt-fuelled building boom, the economy is tipped to slump 2 per cent this year. The country has been one of the hardest hit by the collapse of the housing market. Cement sales fell 52 per cent last month compared with a year earlier.
* Nearly 1.3 million Spanish workers lost their jobs last year, bringing the jobless total to 3.2 million. Spain now has the highest unemployment rate in the EU at 13.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008.The Government expects it to rise to 15.9 per cent this year.
* Almost 3000 businesses and families filed for bankruptcy last year, double the 2007 number.
* The Government plans an 11 billion ($27 billion) infrastructure plan to create more than 300,000 jobs. Most are expected to come from 31,000 public works projects planned.
- OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT
