Locals have pulled back the curtain on the false promises of wind and solar, telling the dirty secrets of supposedly clean and green energy, and doing their best to form a democratic shield against technocrats and capitalists from Madrid to Brussels.
As lovely as it is to see far-flung hamlets of stone houses reinhabited, it is also sometimes difficult to find in their tenuous revival a genuine re-founding of the traditional Europe of which they were originally a part.
The annual protest to rally for politics in favour of rural areas has been going on for years, but this year’s demonstration brought out a record number of participants. Organisers, principally farmers and hunters associations, estimated that 400,000 people marched en masse through several of Madrid’s principal streets.
