Little England
Spain is a hot spot for northern Europeans, but local anger is growing over immigration.
Filmmakers: Frederic Traini and Justin Webster
With a 75 per cent foreign population made up of Britons, Germans and other Europeans, San Fulgencio, a town of 11,000 in the Spanish province of Alicante and traditionally a homogeneous city, has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration.
Thousands of northern Europeans, tired of the damp and cold, are moving south to start new lives in sunny Spain.
It is something of an irony that, once there, many try to re-create the lives they were so desperate to leave back home.
The locals are bemused by their new neighbours – but with up to three quarters of a million Britons spending most of the year there, they cannot be dismissed.
Economists agree that the influx of tourists and foreigners seeking an alternative or second home in the sun has been crucial to Spain’s ten-year economic boom.
The first signs of friction are beginning to emerge, however. The future may not be as simple as it once appeared.
As corruption scandals over excessive building across Spain are provoking a change in mood, Spaniards are not quite so ready to be patronised, and are certainly not as desperate for the cash.
Filmmaker Justin Webster investigates the growing tensions – on both sides – over white immigration.