Casinos, Corporate Sponsorship, and Tuition Hikes: How Madrid Is Trying to Beat the Recession

While there are signs that Spain’s economy is slowly rallying, Madrid is still a city swimming through a toxic cocktail of debt and unemployment. As the capital of a country where over a quarter of the workforce is jobless, Madrid has failed even to cash in on a sharp rise in tourist trips to Spain despite remaining one of Europe’s most delightful cities to visit.

That doesn’t mean the city’s government isn’t making an effort to change things. In fact, it’s trying a host of measures, ranging from the supposed tough love of brutal austerity measures to hawking its metro system out to commercial sponsors. In an unlikely mix of state pruning and raw commercialism, the city is rooting around for numerous ways out of its current impasse. These are some of the key ways Madrid’s right wing government is trying to make the city work.