The town I live in has 27,000+ full time residents and in the summertime the population can double, triple or more depending on what’s going on. Even this summer with pandemic restrictions barely lifted they had a good rise in tourist visits. Since the summer season oficially started on July 1st up until it ended September 1st we had more people drown than die of Covid. Now we are in the midst of another 2 week modified lockdown that has all of the restaurants and bars closed. Why? because of a rise of cases in a city 80km away.
Every major hotel in town has shut down with at least 2 stating that they will never reopen. My next door neighbor ran an adventure tours business for 20 years and it’s totally wiped out. He calls it soul destroying. The owner of our favorite Tapas bar said that if he got shut down again he probably won’t reopen. He’s shut down again. They are causing utter devastation. The pandemic could disappear tomorrow and it would take years for the economy to recover.
In the midst of this we advertised for a cleaner to come to our house a couple of times per week for 2 hours at a time, 10 Euros per hour. We expected a couple of answers. Instead we were doing interviews for days. The common theme was “I really need this job” and some of the women were literally begging for the work. It is so depressing to see what’s going on.