Other murals call for agrarian reform, demilitarisation, ‘peace, bread and work’, an end to homophobia, and solidarity either with or from the people of Palestine, Catalunya, the Basque Country, Peru, Vallecas (a working-class district of Madrid) and Colombia – many of them, in fact, were painted by visitors from struggles beyond the village, who came to see what utopia looks like, in the hope they might take a bit of it home with them. The most detailed of the murals depicts the village’s notorious land seizures in the 1980s, where they addressed Andalusian land inequality directly by occupying what they deemed to be theirs. A chain of marinaleños, Marinaledans, march single file towards the fields in the distance, towards their destiny. They look like L. S. Lowry’s figures if they’d been fattened up and bronzed by a Spanish diet and sun.
On the other side of the road is the Estadio Jornalero, the workers’ stadium, all painted in the village’s ubiquitous tricolour: green for their rural Utopian ideal, red for the workers’ struggle, white for peace. Directly above the stadium on the hill stands the huge multi-purpose indoor sports pavilion, and immaculately rendered on its wall, looking down on the football stadium and the village, is a painting of Che Guevara’s face, approximately the size of a house. Next to this is the parque natural, a substantial, well-kept combination of gardens, benches, two tennis courts, an outdoor gym, and a stone amphitheatre where films are screened on hot summer nights. Across the road is the village’s outdoor swimming pool – admission costs three euros for the year.
Beyond this hub of sport and leisure possibilities are the village’s two schools – one primary, one secondary, and beyond that the casitas, the self-built houses. I’ve never seen a whole street being built on vacant farmland before. It’s a strange sensation, and reminds me of the film Back to the Future, when Marty McFly is sent back in time to 1955 and comes across the empty stretch of land earmarked to become the street he will one day grow up on, sign-posted only by a dreamy architect’s painting.
The new developments in Marinaleda are built directly onto rocky, unpromising black dirt; the darkness on the edge of town is transformed into new life and light. It’s a futurist victory, a conquest of sorts – on one half-built street, the shells of the houses are finished and glistening white, but the road is still waiting to be paved, a reminder of the dead dirt before utopia, and the process of transformation: 3-D sketches of utopian lives, blueprints of possibility. Just around the corner is a recently completed street, in sumptuous white.
The process of building is surprisingly straightforward. The Andalusian government provides the basic materials for the new houses, the bricks and mortar, as well as architectural assistance – and then it is up to the residents-to-be, with help from friends, neighbours and comrades, to build them. In theory, the co-operative owns all the houses; in practice, if individual residents want to repaint their homes, or renovate, no one’s going to stand in their way. The main point, Sergio explained to me, is to ensure that no one has the opportunity to accumulate capital on their property, and thus to speculate on and profit from the housing market.
It’s difficult to argue with this logic, given that you’d be arguing from a position that was instrumental in destroying the Spanish economy. As well as its horrendous eviction stories, crisis-era Spain has four million empty homes, 900,000 of which are new-builds, including entire 10,000-capacity ghost suburbs on the outskirts of Madrid, finished just before the crash and now devoid of life.
While Marinaleda brims with excitement and festivity during its famous annual ferias and carnivals, its numerous high-days and holidays, and the rock gigs that see the village momentarily double in size, most of the time it is incredibly peaceful.
Except, an hour or so before dusk, when all hell breaks loose. Dominating the cacophony is a chorus of shrill, chirruping birds. I once asked Antonio, my landlord in the village, what kind of birds they were – he didn’t know, but he did a perfect imitation: they sound like a falling bomb in a cartoon, just prior to impact. ‘I think they migrated from the park – I think they’re tropical?’ They’re quite difficult to spot because they are clustered tightly in the evergreen orange trees, engaged in fierce but invisible debate. Competing to be heard are dozens of dogs of diverse size and shape, who have perfected a web-like network of conversation across the white stone garden walls.
In among this come baying cockerels, and from the main road, the slowly grinding gears of a tractor, a few heavy-goods lorries and, with varying regularity, cars pounding out cheaply made dance music, the vehicles’ frames rattling along in concert. Because Avenida de la Libertad is also the A-388, connecting other small pueblos, such as Herrera and El Rubio, with each other and with the big cities, there’s a fair amount of through traffic, kicking up the dust into the hazy sunshine – or, for a few days each winter, the wide, still rain puddles. At the weekend, the through traffic is usually playing reggaeton, the Latin dance music innovation that is surely the most appropriately communist of all dance music subgenres, in the sense that there is seemingly only one rhythm track, without variation, deviation or adornment, available to all its exponents.
One morning, soon after arriving for my first period living in the village, I was invited for coffee with Chris and Ali, two of the ten or so British couples who have retired there (and one of the few who seemed to have done so with an enthusiasm for its political peculiarities). We sat in their back garden in the winter sunshine, and they showed off the work they’d done in their two years there, planting and landscaping. They still needed to buy some garden furniture, they explained, but it was impossible to get across to their Spanish neighbours what garden furniture was. The marinaleños couldn’t grasp it as a concept – and you can’t buy it in the shops. Why? Because the outdoors is for socialising together, publicly: out front, not in the back.
The streets are the social centre of the pueblo, observed Julian Pitt-Rivers in The People of the Sierra, his landmark 1954 study of the village of Grazalema, only seventy-five miles south of Marinaleda and almost exactly the same size, with a population of just over 2,000.
And sure enough, when the sun is shining, which it almost always is, the older ladies of Marinaleda bring their (dining table) chairs out onto the pavement, together or alone, and chat to their neighbours as they pass by. Alternatively, they take a short stroll to one of the many benches that line Avenida de la Libertad and wait for someone to join them. Front doors are left open, eliding the division between the family space and the public space – even the primary school gates are open while the children play.
To understand Andalusia, its remarkable culture and politics, it is necessary to understand the concept of the pueblo. It is a wonderful word which means village, town, or even city, and simultaneously a people – and in that dual meaning lies the key to its magic. A village is its people. You might travel far away from its boundaries, never to return, and subsume yourself into the heady multi-cultures of city life, but you are still, in your essence, a son or daughter of the pueblo, and you will never lose that.
Each pueblo is a unique space, but its uniqueness comes from the claustrophobia of never being permitted to own, or even roam, the land outside the limits of the village: the unreformed feudal-style system concentrated land ownership in the hands of a few aristocratic families. In the south, the countryside has always been so big and sparsely populated that there is even a social imperative behind the historic congregation in these small communities. The fact Andalusia never had an industrial revolution means there was no great wave of urbanisation in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.