The Gazette reported last month online about a doctor who allegedly mistreated his eight children and his wife. He works in a hospital in Madrid. This affair obviously received a lot of media attention and on one news-orientated chat show (Espejo Público on Atresmedia national TV) one of the people discussing the case, Beatriz de Vicente, commented, “…we’re not talking about the some dead-end illiterate in the Alpujarra Granadina…”

Well, that went down like a lead balloon in Granada on social media and it wasn’t long before the Mayor of Capileira, José Fernando Castro, decided to fire back a formal complaint to the TV channel concerned, demanding an apology for this “offence against Los Alpujarreños.”

After all, this was about a case of child abuse in Madrid and had nothing to do with the Alpujarra; the commentator had wished to point out that this was a well-educated, middle-class family and not a marginalised one in rural Spain. The irony is that she probably spends holidays in the Alpujarra because she loves the place, but that ingrained image of the cateto rural made her blurt out the first rural place that came to mind.

But the Mayor was firmly mounted on his charger and with the municipal elections a mere month away decided that if taking on snobs in Madrid wouldn’t get him re-elected, nothing would.

The truth of the matter is that illiteracy in Spain is fast disappearing as the generation born in the late 30s and early 40s that grew up in Franco’s impoverished and hungry rural Spain join their ancestors. Adult education, pushed by socialist governments in the 80s, convinced all those women that had received little or no education in the 40s and 50s that they were not stupid and learning to read and write could be fun and not something to be ashamed about.

(News: Capileira, Alpujarra, Granada, Andalucia)