Letter from Spain: weary warrior

It was a beautiful sight. The fairytale white dwellings of Estepa nestling against the hillside in the early morning light.

Generally, the Andalusian landscape seemed even more arcadian in the soft light at the beginning and end of the day. But this idyllic setting masked the reality of another Spain.

In the car park of our Estepa hotel a well-dressed and articulate young man asked us in Spanish for €10 ($11) for petrol to put into his car.

He had ninos (children) he said. It was urgent.

Suppressing our guilt – and hampered by our confusion over how to react to the numerous beggars we encountered in the country – my wife and I handed him some coins. Not enough for the petrol, but enough for a coffee.

Grudgingly, he took it.

We took a taxi to Marinaleda – a remote village some 12km from Estepa where the locals have created a socialist utopia in part as an antidote to the effects of la crisis – the economic downturn currently afflicting Spain.

We were granted an audience with Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo – the iconic mayor who has led the move since the death of Franco to run the village democratically along idealistic and cooperative lines.

He was smaller than I had imagined and slightly gaunt in appearance. We sat at a wooden round table in the mayoral office and discussed – as far as our limited Spanish would allow – his utopian village for about an hour.

There were four of us with him: my wife and I, a French trade unionist and her partner, an academic.

I was struck by Gordillo’s expressive face and his counter-cultural appearance. Jeans. A short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned nearly to his waist. Leather and beaded bracelets on his wrists and a beaded necklace. A full beard. It conjured up in my mind images of various Latin American revolutionaries.

A framed photograph of Che Guevara hung on the wall behind him.

As he spoke, his eyes had a slightly bemused aspect tinged, I thought, with some sadness – or weariness.

“They are after him,” we were told later by an British expatriate living in the village, referring to the fact that he is being pursued by Spanish authorities over some direct action in which he and others took food from a supermarket and distributed it to the poor.

“He’s in his 60s now,” she said. “There’s a risk he’ll go to jail. It must be a terrible worry for him. And of course he works very hard. I think all this has been getting him down.”

We spoke to a couple of local teachers – one secondary, the other primary. We wanted to know how far the village’s utopian ethos is reflected in the school curriculum.

“It isn’t,” was their answer. “The school curriculum is centrally controlled at all levels of schooling and its content and approach is decreed by higher government authority.”

One teacher didn’t want to discuss the issue further. “I am afraid to get involved in village politics,” she said.

“I have a teaching job and I want to keep it. I have a mortgage. Jobs are hard to find in Spain.”

Guardian Weekly regularly publishes a Letter from one of its readers from around the world. We welcome submissions – they should focus on giving a clear sense of a place and its people. Please send them to weekly.letters@theguardian.com