Monesterio

02 May 2025

“Salesman hotel in a one-dog town” is the considered opinion of the non-judgemental liberal I’m travelling with, and I can’t disagree. We’ve flogged it here down the Autovía against an unrelenting 40 Kmh wind, only to get drenched about ten miles from the destination, a forbidding cloud visible for the last half an hour.

This is a gritty, functional town in the middle of the agricultural heartland of Extremadura, full of tractor dealers and firms fixing tractors. The buildings are uniformly white-painted, presumably to deflect the searing heat we had hoped for, which sadly is not in evidence. We’re only here as it bisects the distance between Plasencia and Jerez, so have limited expectations.

Despite its utilitarian nature, the small town centre has a few bars, and the one we pick at random can’t be faulted. Smiley and tolerant of gringos with next-to-zero Spanish, everyone here is local, in high spirits, and it’s building to a big Friday night in Monesterio.

The usually woeful TripAdvisor suggests the ‘Honky Tonk Taberna Extremeña’ is the #1 restaurant, but the name is enough to put us off, along with the lame, barely literate reviews. But ‘Los Templarios’ looks much better and it punches way above the £30 a head we spent there on about six shareable tapas and a few wines.

So how does Spain do it? We speculate that the Northern European work ethic is one of being seen to be both busy and diligent at all times. Roughly translated, this now means vast swathes of the UK workforce will cram their days with pointless Zoom calls, write endless tedious emails that no one can be arsed to read, insist on additional time to prevaricate on decisions they ultimately fail to make, and so on. By contrast, Spaniards seem to realise most of what passes for ‘value-creation’ is as vacuous as the phrase itself. So they seem to just cut out this charade of chore, this illusion of industry, knowing the outcome will be roughly the same but life will be sweeter that way.

Given the enormous productivity gains of the last fifty years, the idea of a state-subsidised Universal Basic Income and much more leisure time— a heresy to us Children of Thatcher— is now attracting serious, scholarly attention. Maybe Spain is ahead of the pack here. GDP per capita might be about 30% less than the UK, but casual empiricism suggests the cost of living is at least that much lower.

A nose in an estate agent’s window in Plasencia— an hour’s train ride from the capital, Madrid  - had property listed for less than half what a similar house an hour from London is. Ultimately, quality of life— that nebulous concept— just seems better here, more equal, and the people much happier with none of the simmering anger that infects so much of the UK at present. That said, I’m not sure it’s possible to politically engineer this restribution using the iron fist of taxation on the one hand and the Novocaine of state-funded benefits on the other. The UK has tried this and it just doesn’t work: the affluent get pissed off with this eventually then leave, and it only encourages idle skankery in those with their hand out. No, like the much admired Scandi model of high taxation and excellent public provision, the Spanish lifestyle has evolved by concensus and is difficult to replicate. It probaly also helps that Spain has food security (producing a big surplus that earns foreign income through exports) and the sun usually shines a lot.

I’ve heard that much of Spain was secretly pleased when the UK elected to leave the UK as Brits taking advantage of freedom of movement seemed by one of two tribes: Pushy, affluent Home Counties types, cashing in their small, terraced house in an Inner London war zone for a million quid, dreaming of long wine-drenched lunches and the afternoon siesta, driving up property prices to levels, uncomfortable for locals who could otherwise enjoy a comfortable life without having to work too hard. Or skint, wheezing northerners, looking to avail themselves of a lower-cost of living while benefiting from what appears to be a public health service demonstrably superior to the UK’s. If true, one can understand why the Spain might have breathed a sigh of relief on 23 June 2016.