austerity in Spain has, in truth, been mild.

I ask Raul Limon of El Pais if Spain could go the way of Greece: "If Europe does not support Spain, yes. So far people think Europe cannot let us fall - and as long as we think that, people are waiting for the solution. The moment people think Europe is letting us fall, people will stop complaining and start protesting." At a political level, for all the perennial fractiousness of Catalan and Basque politics, for all the corruption allegations, the system is holding in a way that the Greek system did not. There is no rapid formation and fragmentation of parties; no collapse of elites into warring factions. Yet. And Spanish people know better than anybody in Europe how nasty it can get if politics fails. On the Somonte farm, out of the blue, the occupiers are buzzed by men flying powered microlites. It's fun at first, until they spot that two of the flyers are displaying Francoist flags and realise its an airborne counter-protest. Lola points to an old man shuffling quietly at the edge of the group of farm workers. That's my father, she says: in the civil war the local landowners, Francoists, made him drink olive oil and eat grasshoppers to force him to vomit up the "red" that was inside him. She draws two lines down her cheeks with stiff fingers: "He cannot tell the story without crying".