Pontevedra: 700-euro rents and a major company leaving

Return to Pontevedra: 700-euro rent and a company leaving

Thirteen years away and fifteen days back. That is the interval with which this return has measured the city again, after a journey through Barcelona, Girona and Toledo, and the result does not fit the story of Galicia's take-off. Pontevedra has 83,000 inhabitants and a landlady who took 24 hours to let a 90-square-metre flat for 700 euros a month, with a queue of applicants. On the other side of the scale, one of the city's largest companies has announced it is moving to Madrid and the news was not front-page in the local press. It did not even appear in the rival digital outlet.

700 euros for 90 square metres and a queue of tenants

A flat of around 90 square metres in a middle-class neighbourhood of the city is let for 700 euros a month. The landlady needed barely 24 hours and had a waiting list. For a city of 83,000 inhabitants, that behaviour responds to scarcity and sustained demand from civil servants and professionals.

The diagnosis of the returnee points to an older city, with a different social scene and a visible turnover in its elites. The offspring of well-off families leave for Madrid, and in their place comes population from the rest of Galicia. The result, it is argued, is a place with pretensions to modernity and an increasingly provincial core. The paradox sits badly: the city ages and yet housing has become a scarce commodity.

One of the city's largest companies moves to Madrid

The productive fabric exists, it is just that nobody seems to look at it. In the nearby O Campiño industrial estate operate Aludec, Arnoia, Mape and Comercial Martínez Sánchez, owner of Cash Galicia. Add to that the fishing companies of Marín and the proximity of Vigo, less than thirty kilometres away.

The one leaving is Eidf, based in Barro. According to this diagnosis, it ranks third locally by size, behind only San José —whose head office is in Madrid— and Froiz. Its move to Madrid was not front-page in the Diario de Pontevedra and did not merit a single line in the rival digital outlet.

What does make headlines is that Pontesampaio, a parish in the municipality, has no doctor, or the corsair festival in Marín. The disconnect between the city and its own economy is not new, but the returnee perceives it as deeper than a decade ago. The detail of which companies really sustain local employment, with names and sectors, would make a map that public conversation ignores.

Hostels, laundries and care homes: the business that does grow

Around the Camino de Santiago, which crosses the urban core, hostels and laundries have proliferated to surprising extremes: they appear next to the train station and in the very centre, at the height of Uxío Novoneyra. At the same time, care homes and care companies multiply. One of those employing the most workers in the city is Idades, dedicated to care for dependents. Ageing ceases to be a front-page topic and becomes an economic sector with a workforce.

The fading Casino and a birthday with a show

The Liceo Casino, the city's most elegant recreational society, looks half-dead. It was already in decline when businesspeople lost interest and it was reduced to a club for doctors and lawyers, with the local festivities' dance as the only exception. Its rival, the Casino Mercantil, is worse off. The new board is headed by a member of the family that owns the private hospital, sold years ago to the Quirón group.

The most talked-about episode has been another: the reservation of part of the premises for the birthday of two members, with a show by singer Leticia Sabater. The uproar was immediate. On the cultural front, the same diagnosis applied to Catalonia weighs heavily: outside the local scene —Baiuca, Mercedes Peón, Susana Seivane— there is little to hold on to since Caixanova stopped financing the city's cultural life.

Why is Galician heard more than thirteen years ago?

It is one of the most notable changes. Without being the majority, in fifteen days you hear conversations in Galician that were previously unlikely in the city. The phenomenon has led to a clash of frameworks. Some argue that the language is the very basis of culture and that without its own language there is no real difference. Others respond that cultural differences between peoples who share a language are not anecdotal, that furanchos and retranca would still be there without the language, and that the discourse of language as a mark of identity drinks from a constructed victimhood.

In the background loom the school and public television, with a regional channel against dozens in Castilian, and the suspicion —debated— that the model is moving in the direction of Catalan, although starting from a different situation.

"Pontevedra is very dirty": the fight over cleanliness and rats

The pavement was the first battleground. The returnee maintains that the city is very dirty, with black spots that persist even on Benito Corbal, the commercial artery, and compares it with Toledo, central Madrid or Vigo. The reply came quickly: comparing the centre of Pontevedra with that of Madrid is, it is said, a classic, and the only Galician city where this interlocutor has seen large, antiestéticarless rats is Vigo, in the middle of Urzaiz. There is disagreement even on cleanliness, which is the most objective thing in the world.

What gets stuck

The pleasant part is the connections: Pontevedra-Vigo Urzaiz in 13 minutes, intermodal station, trains to A Coruña and Santiago that have nothing to do with what there was before. The uncomfortable part is that, with those times and those prices, the city should attract population and activity massively. It does not happen. And nobody quite works out why.