I’ve just come back from ten days staying with my daughter in Valencia, on the east coast of Spain, and the word you hear all the time is ‘la crisis’.

Saturday’s edition of the distinguished daily newspaper El Pais (whose management recently announced plans to cut a third of its workforce) led with the story that over 25% of workers nationwide, most from the public sector, were now out of work.  More than 830,000 jobs have gone in the last 12 months with the number of unemployed now nudging six million.

These numbers conflate, of course, those who have lost their jobs (more than a million of these being aged fifty or over, a third with little formal education) and those who have never known work.

The Spanish equivalent of our word neets (‘not in employment, education or training’) is ninis, referring to young people who are ni educados ni employados (neither in education nor employed). But even those who are being educated can suffer from the effect of the cuts. Last week most of the primary schools in the town of Cadiz, again as reported in El Pais, were closed on health and safety grounds because the local authorities had slashed the salaries of non-teaching staff, as a result of which the classrooms, corridors and playgrounds were full of decaying rubbish.

Cadiz, it is true, is in Andalucia, which is the worst affected of all the regions of Spain. But Valencia and its province is not far behind.  Teachers have seen their wages cut, while being forced to work longer hours and teach larger classes; pharmacists have not been reimbursed for some time for medicines which they have dispensed to those patients who have them free or at subsidised prices.  And, out in the countryside, smaller firefighting units have been amalgamated into larger ones, more widely dispersed, which has led to more devastating forest fires when it can take hours to reach the sites.

Everyone has tales to tell, of municipal corruption, incompetence and sheer bad will, of people suddenly out in the street for, apparently, no fault of their own. I was told of a retired couple, their mortgage long paid, who took out a new one to help their married son buy a house. He and his wife lost their jobs, leaving them unable to pay their mortgage and repay the parents. The result?  Both properties repossessed by the banks, who just sit on them, unable to find buyers in the current climate. Two generations homeless.

Not much of this is obvious on a sunny October day in the centre of Valencia.  True there seem to be more beggars about, one man, I noticed, head down, clutching a sign saying, Tengo hambre (‘I’m hungry’).  But the streets are still clean, with many of the cleaners young and fit, in quite fetching uniforms, glad to have any kind of job, I imagine.  And there are still people holding up umbrellas or cards, identifying themselves to the group they are guiding around a city which is becoming increasingly popular with tourists, both Spanish and foreign.

Yet, despite this, between July and September, the height of the tourist season, a further 26,500 Valencianos found themselves out of work, an increase for that trimester only beaten by Andalucia.  Some of these must have been the owners and employees of the many cafes and restaurants which have closed down, since people are eating out less often and spending less when they do.  In Calle de Trench, just round the corner from my daughter’s flat, there is a takeaway place selling good quality freshly cooked food, including four different types of the rice dishes for which the city is famous. At the best of times a portion is cheap, just two euros. But at seven pm there is a queue in front, eight or nine people deep, waiting to buy any unsold food at just one euro the portion.

Recently El Pais wrote that, in the last three years, 16,159 Valencianos, mostly well educated, have left the city for jobs abroad, with no immediate intention of returning. ‘Fuga de cerebros’ doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘brain drain’, its equivalent in English, but it is just as sad.

The Goethe Institut in Valencia, with places for 1,500 students a year, is bursting at the seams, with a waiting list of 20 (mostly engineers and architects) for their Saturday morning German classes.

English, of course, is even more popular, which is good news for Celine and many of her expat friends who rely on teaching English for all or much of their income. But even this sector is being affected. Hourly rates at evening classes run by the local authority have - you’ve guessed - been cut. And one of our friends, who has taught English to private business people, for years in many cases, says that some of her long-standing students are cutting their hours, or even stopping altogether.

English teaching hasn’t been my daughter’s favourite way of earning money for some time:  her main profession is kinesiology, defined as

a system of diagnosis and treatment that asks the body what it wants by combining muscle testing with the principles of Chinese medicine, to assess energy and body function, using a range of gentle yet powerful techniques.

(click here for a more detailed account of kinesiology)

But, even though she has a lot of people coming to her following recommendations from friends (and I can recommend her thoroughly; she sorted out my chronic lower back pain without any form of manipulation), the income from this isn’t enough to keep her going. And the restaurant where she worked preparing food three mornings a week hasn’t been doing so well, so that’s another regular source of income down the drain.  All this means that, like many people in Valencia, throughout the whole of Spain indeed, she is having to juggle more than one way of earning a crust. Good luck to her, and all the others in her position.