Credit Crunch

The economic crisis that had engulfed the western world in 2007 seemed to have hit Vigo pretty hard. The boom of the early 2000’s had probably not really benefitted this working class town very much but the collapse that followed certainly had. I found closing down sales and boarded up shops on every street and an area that in more prosperous towns would have been called a ‘conservation area’ was instead full of beautiful decaying shells. An extract from my notebook: ‘As the sun went down I decided to take a walk up through the old town. I soon realized that parts of this area were inhabited by people who could barely afford to run electricity let alone preserve period features. Here was genuine poverty, not families in Umbro shellsuits with ASBO’s but hungry old people wearing rags without any lighting. I turned into one street to find a woman in a threadbare football shirt surrounded by around 50 flea bitten cats. She stared at me blankly, barely registering the surprise of seeing a tourist in her part of town.’ (click images to enlarge)