From Pozuelo to Pinoso

A little while back, I went up to Valencia to visit the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero. Before going, I asked a pal, who lives in the city, which were the city’s up-and-coming districts where we’d be able to get a trendy lunch. You know the sort of places: where traditional bakers selling white breadsticks are being pushed aside by sourdough-and-croissant specialists, and an abandoned engineering works is now full of small businesses trying to get rich selling kites, old clothes or offering bike repairs. She suggested Ruzafa.

When, a couple of weeks ago, the INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) published its Atlas de Distribución de Renta de los Hogares, giving average net income per person, it reminded me of that visit. I started thinking about how some neighbourhoods become fashionable, property prices rise and new businesses move in, while others are left behind to stagnate and decay. I wondered whether the fashionable neighbourhoods were necessarily the wealthy ones, and whether the same sort of contrasts could be found in towns and cities closer to home.

The news report on the radio said that the richest municipality in Spain has an average income of more than 32,000€, so the obvious first thing to do was to see how we compared. Not so well, is the answer. Pinoso comes in at 11,361€.

I felt poorer, but it wasn’t really a big surprise. I didn’t really need a statistical atlas to work out that Pinoso isn’t as chic as certain parts of Madrid, just as I know that certain parts of Madrid are as scummy as others are posh.

At the top of the table is Pozuelo de Alarcón, just outside Madrid, with an average annual net income per person of 32,612€. This is presumably somewhere you can park your car in the street without worrying that somebody will pinch your hubcaps. Matadepera, near Barcelona, and Boadilla del Monte, another Madrid suburb, are not far behind. At the other end are places such as Iznalloz in Granada and El Palmar de Troya in Sevilla, where average incomes are below 9,500€.

The contrasts are just as striking within the big cities. Salamanca and El Viso in Madrid, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi and Pedralbes in Barcelona, and El Pla del Remei and El Pla del Real in Valencia are a world away from poorer districts such as Vallecas, Ciutat Meridiana and Natzaret. These are broad geographical comparisons rather than necessarily identical statistical areas, but the differences in the character and prosperity of these parts of the cities are pretty obvious.

But cities are not static. The sort of neighbourhoods my friend was talking about are appearing in lots of Spanish cities. In Madrid, for instance, old industrial buildings in Carabanchel are becoming artists’ studios and galleries, while Usera’s established Chinese and Latin American businesses are finding themselves alongside newer cafés and cultural spaces. Barcelona’s Poblenou has swapped many of its old factories for technology and design companies. In Valencia, El Cabanyal’s old fishermen’s quarter is attracting restaurants and small businesses, while La Raiosa, near Joaquín Sorolla station, is also smartening up.

And, since Sorolla’s name has come up, the recently reopened Sorolla Museum in Madrid has extended into a former garage, adding space for more of the Valencian artist’s work.

It’s an interesting process, although not always a particularly welcome one for the people who already live there. New businesses arrive, property prices rise, the original communities may be displaced, and, as the neighbourhood becomes fashionable, the whole dynamic changes. The family that has run the bar on the corner sells out to a new eatery that serves lots of avocado and fancy mushroom toast for the newcomers, and the old established families sell their homes at inflated prices and move to somewhere where they can still afford the coffee and get a ham and cheese toastie.

But let’s bring things a little closer to home. In Alicante province, some of the wealthier municipalities tend to be around the capital and along parts of the northern Costa Blanca. Sant Joan d’Alacant, Jávea and Altea are among the more prosperous places. At the other end of the income scale are municipalities such as Formentera del Segura, Algorfa and San Fulgencio and, right on our doorstep, Hondon de los Frailes. Elda, with its long history of footwear manufacturing, also reflects the difficulties faced by towns whose traditional industries have been under pressure.

Pinoso, Monóvar, Novelda, Petrer and Elda occupy a rather less glamorous position in the national rankings. Their average incomes are broadly in the 11,000€ to 13,500€ range. These are working towns, where agriculture, marble, footwear, furniture and wine provide much of the employment. You don’t have to look far to see what people do for a living: vineyards, almond groves, marble yards, shoe factories and industrial estates are pretty obvious.

One of the more interesting comparisons is with the coastal resorts. You might imagine that people living in Santa Pola or Guardamar have more money than those living in Pinoso or Monóvar. Surely beachfront apartments, boats in the marinas and the big fenced-in villas suggest greater wealth, yet average incomes in some coastal municipalities are surprisingly similar to those inland.

Part of the explanation is that the coastal economy depends heavily on tourism and hospitality, which don’t always provide particularly well-paid jobs. There are also large numbers of retired people, Spanish and foreign, whose regular incomes may be relatively modest. And somebody who owns an expensive holiday home but spends only a few weeks a year in it doesn’t necessarily appear in the local income figures. The money may be visible, but it isn’t necessarily being earned there.

It’s a useful reminder that wealth and income aren’t quite the same thing. You can own an expensive property and have a modest pension, or live in an ordinary house in an inland town and be perfectly comfortable.

While we are talking euros I thought it might be interesting to see how the other end of the financial spectrum was getting on. Spain’s wealthiest man is Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex and the man behind Zara, with an estimated fortune of 125.2 billion. His daughter Sandra Ortega is worth 11.5 billion. Juan Roig, Mr Mercadona, has accumulated around 9.8 billion, while Rafael del Pino of Ferrovial is worth an estimated 7.8 billion. Florentino Pérez, better known as the president of Real Madrid, has a rather more modest 4.9 billion to his name. Modest, of course, is a relative term.

There’s another interesting figure worth considering. The average annual gross salary in Spain is nearly 29,500€, but the most common salary is just 16,520€. The average is pulled upwards by the relatively small number of people earning very high salaries, so the most common salary is considerably below the headline figure. In fact, the median salary, the point at which half of employees earn more and half earn less, is around 24,500€.

These salary figures measure employees’ gross pay, whereas the Atlas measures net income per person after taxes and other adjustments. They are different measures, so they are useful for showing broad patterns rather than for making exact comparisons.

But, whatever the figures tell us, it’s still true that you can have a decent life in Spain on a fairly modest income. You don’t need to be a billionaire, or even particularly wealthy, to enjoy living here. And perhaps that’s a more useful measure of prosperity than any of the league tables. Although, if you fancy a meal in Pozuelo, don’t expect me to pay.