Galicia, it seems, has proportionately the highest number of unoccupied properties in Spain. There are two poles-apart reasons for this. Firstly, people are leaving the land up in the mountains and, secondly, rather richer people have been buying second and third places purely for investment purposes. The national and regional governments insist they want to see an end to construction well in excess of actual needs but there are at least two factors which must make them ambivalent about it all. Firstly, Spain’s current high rate of economic growth is largely driven by this construction boom and, secondly, with a sales tax of 6-7% on every purchase, the government stands to see a large reduction in revenues when it stops. Rather as with cigarette smoking. So we just get lectures.

I’ve had occasion in the past to mention the idiosyncratic columnist of El Mundo, Francisco Umbral. His trademark is a column which, under some pretext or other, yokes together all sorts of heterogeneous names. These are usually Spaniards, of course, but today he managed to get into his column Zinadine Zidane, Dorian Gray, General Milans de Bosch, Carl von Clausewitz, the Marquis de Sade, Marat and Baudelaire. Which is quite impressive. As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about.

I read today of another booming business in Spain going international with great success. On the border with France – in a town which will remain unnamed - there’s a huge brothel which has 500 French customers a day during the week and double at the weekend. I wonder if they do things differently in France. Or whether it’s just a question of price. I also wonder if they still offer ‘French without’ or whether it becomes ‘Spanish without’