Uxía Martinez, Manuel García, Álvaro López and Adrián Camesella on Monday during the Laza carnival, Ourense/ ÓSCAR CORRAL (EL PAÍS).ÓSCAR CORRAL
“Emigrating should be an option, not an obligation”
(University Library, Santiago de Compostela).
In one of the tense moments of the debate they had during the campaign, on February 5, the candidate of the BNG and the PP, Ana Pontón turned, looked at Alfonso Rueda and told him: “In Galicia unemployment is lower than in the rest of Spain because 200,000 young people have left in recent years.”
The phrase, in a land that has been expelling young people all its life, sounded like a ship, cardboard suitcases and goodbyes.
One Saturday in February, while half of Galicia is paralyzed by the carnival, three young people who do not want to leave leave the Concepción Arenal library in Santiago de Compostela.
Cristian Leiro, from Caldas de Reis, pauses after an afternoon in front of the notes of an opposition to the Ministry of Finance.
“We have the highest unemployment in Europe and when we start with the internship, the working conditions they present to you are frustrating.
Yes, I am afraid of the future,” he concludes.
Cristian, 23 years old, complains about his job as an intern, to which he dedicates 40 hours a week and for which he charges below the minimum wage.
“Companies and landlords have too much power,” he summarizes.
When he hears the word “homemade,” his partner Clara Otero, who initially did not want to speak, jumps like a spring: “With the salaries paid in Galicia it is very difficult to become independent.
To stop young people leaving, they should act on the price of rents, which have skyrocketed in cities like Santiago,” she says about an autonomous community with a salary 150 euros below the national average.
Her partner Cinthia Piñeiro studied journalism and is now taking a training course while she saves for a master's degree in Madrid for which she needs 10,000 euros.
“Almost all my university classmates went to Madrid and some to Barcelona.
Something always ends up coming out there.
Emigrating should be an option and not an obligation,” he says.
Behind the young people, Ricardo González, 35 years old and from Rianxo, a seaside town 45 minutes from the library, is preparing a doctorate in Philosophy.
“Most of my friends are outside Galicia.
They finish studying and leave.
Factories close and the industry we had is disappearing.
A reindustrialization plan for Galicia is urgent,” he summarizes.
This Sunday, 86,000 young people who have practically only known a PP government will be able to vote for the first time.
They represent 4% of the electoral roll, compared to 25% of pensioners.
In that 4% of first-time young people are, according to the CIS, those most interested in politics, but also the largest number of undecided and abstentionists.
The data confirms that the only debate in which Rueda participated with the main candidates broke an audience record among younger people, although in an improvised survey at the doors of the library, only one of the five students chosen at random watched the debate. and does not remember a proposal aimed at young people.
About to start raining, Ana González, 24, goes out to smoke a cigarette after a gray afternoon dedicated to finishing her thesis in sociology.
For Ana, born in Vigo, stopping the departure of young people is only possible with investment in R&D.
“Some of the best researchers are coming out of the universities of Santiago or Vigo with cutting-edge and cutting-edge projects, but there are no resources to hire them,” she says.
Whatever happens this Sunday, Ana has already decided that in a few months she will leave Santiago for some European capital.
Cristian Leiro (23), Cinthia Piñeiro (23) and Clara Otero (23), in front of the Concepción Arenal Library of the USC./ ÓSCAR CORRAL (EL PAÍS).ÓSCAR CORRAL
“Fishing dies with us”
(O Grove Port, Pontevedra).
There is no cocktail bar in Madrid that serves pomace, whiskeys and brandies at the speed that the tavern in the port of O Grove does at six in the morning.
Some arrive from the sea, others prepare to set sail, and others wait for the storm to subside.
Rude men, with hands like Cea bread and wrinkles from the sun when it doesn't even appear.
“This dies with us,” says Antonio Oubiña, pointing to the sea.
“Yes, like the drug dealer,” he anticipates the little joke repeated a thousand times.
One more day, Oubiña cleans and untangles a heavy net that she lifts by hand.
He is the son and grandson of sailors who one day filled a port where there are fewer and fewer people.
“Before I had a line of sailors to work and now I only have a Peruvian assistant,” he says without looking up from the network.
“There are many hours for a job that leaves a fair salary to get by.
You have to pay for self-employment, boat insurance, life insurance, civil liability insurance... We even pay a fee for the maintenance of light signals at sea,” he lists.
Oubiña fishes cuttlefish and spider crab, but the water temperature has risen so much in recent years that catches have fallen dramatically.
“In 10 years, half of the ships you see will have disappeared,” he predicts.
When they are not there, everything will be filled with sailboats, catamarans and boats from which you can see the seabed.
The sea beats choppy and threatening.
The storm
Karlotta,
which in O Grove was felt like a hurricane, has just passed and has forced the fleet to remain moored for four days.
On mornings like this, collecting testimonies at the foot of the port is a succession of dramas.
On the deck of
O' Tornado
, José Antonio and his sister Beatriz Estévez prepare the gear to capture the oyster.
One works and loads and the other transports and sells.
And backwards.
“Last year 85% of the oysters died,” says José Antonio.
A change in the salinity of the sea killed practically all the production of a very high quality mollusk thanks to the unique plankton of the estuary.
A problem that rarely leaves the port, but that has ruined hundreds of shellfish harvesters and has left the mussel and oyster sector mortally wounded.
“Our oyster is better, but changes in the sea and unequal competition are ruining us,” says Beatriz.
“We are trying to recover, but they force us to undergo so many controls that it is impossible to be competitive.
The market is full of products from abroad that are not subject to the same demands,” adds José Antonio about the octopus from Morocco or the oyster from France.
“In the case of France, their waters are considered certified and they are not forced, like us, to go through treatment plants that not only destroy the estuary with discharges, but also represent an added expense,” he protests on the deck of a ship. which could be a tractor in the middle of the N-VI.
Oyster farmers.
Beatriz Estévez (41) and José Antonio Estévez in the port of O Grove, Pontevedra/ ÓSCAR CORRAL (EL PAÍS).ÓSCAR CORRAL
Everything is boring outside of Laza
(Laza Carnival, Ourense)
To explain Laza, it can be said that it is a town of 1,200 inhabitants in the Ourense mountains.
That lives poorly on agriculture and livestock and that celebrates a unique carnival considered an Asset of Cultural Interest.
You can say that or evoke the legendary black and white photograph that Cristina García Rodero took at the 1985 carnival. In it, a local man in his underwear laughs in front of the Magnum photographer's lens with his penis in one hand and a bottle in the other.
The living image of cathartic happiness.
Almost 40 years after that photograph, in the same place there is a popletista, a Nazi soldier, a nun and a man with a broccoli on his head.
While the political class spends its health on eternal tours from town to town, the triangle formed by Verín, Xinzo de Limia and Laza, south of the capital of Ourense, has been immersed for two weeks in excessive carnivals that are renewed every day in masks, streetwalkers, rituals, sleepless nights, alcohol and fireworks.
Outside of this magical triangle, rallies, banners and electoral programs are a slap in the face waiting for everyone to wake up.
Galicia cannot be understood without its festivals.
No candidate allowed himself the luxury of not being seen in Lalín during the
Feira do cocido
and all have gone through the
entrance
of Xinzo or Verín.
However, the one that no one attended was Laza's.
It's
Boralleiro [quarrelsome] Monday
and the brass band makes a mass of people crazy dressed and covered in flour, mud or donkey excrement dance in the town square.
Thousands of people move among the
peliqueiros
[the typical carnival costume] in a hypnotic way to the rhythm of the cymbals, the drum and the cowbells.
And, in the midst of so much excess, the perfect question to be expelled from the town:
- What did you think of the campaign?
"Boring," responds the man with the green wig and spy coat.
“They talk a lot about topics that don't interest me.
“The amnesty and things like that that have nothing to do with us.”
“Pretty boring,” adds his friend, dressed as a Caribbean pirate.
In reality, everything that happens outside of Laza right now is boring.
The one with the green wig speaks again: “I don't know if there will be political change, but certainly in the area of Verín, where I am from, the economic situation has to change because there is no work at all.
The companies are closing one after another and now only retirees are left, four businesses open and people receiving payments,” he laments before getting lost among the happy people.
In the midst of the bacchanal, it is difficult to believe that in 2003, Manuel Fraga, the man who is said to have best understood Galicia, removed the carnival festival from the work calendar to return it to March 19, Saint Joseph's Day, and thus recover “what “which is part of the tradition, history and culture of Galicia.”
Four friends, Uxía, Manuel, Álvaro and Adrián, enter the square covered in flour with a bag of ants previously soaked in vinegar in their hands.
“I'm going to vote, but the truth is that the campaign didn't interest me much,” says 23-year-old Ávaro López, one of the thousands of undecided people who have chosen their vote in recent days.
According to surveys, almost 15% of undecided voters will choose their ballot at the ballot box this Sunday.
When Álvaro remembers his friends who left Galicia, his friend Adrián, who is wearing a sequined shirt and two cabbages in his hand, contradicts him and says that living outside of Galicia is overrated.
“In Switzerland you earn 5,000 euros a month, but a room costs 2,000″, he summarizes with the forcefulness of someone who has talked a lot about the subject with those who return.
—What is he dressed as?
- I'm not dressed up.
The interview ends when a sack of flour, mud and angry ants falls from the sky on everyone's heads.
Although it may seem unthinkable now, yesterday was also
a day of reflection
in Laza.
A peliqueiro during the carnival in Laza./ ÓSCAR CORRAL (EL PAÍS).ÓSCAR CORRAL
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