Gateway to Europe: Madrid’s leaning towers offer a potent symbol of debt-fuelled folly

In this anxious lull between the Spanish bailout and the Greek election result, the most potent symbol of the continent’s perilous financial state is Madrid’s Puerta de Europa, or ‘Gateway to Europe’. That happens to be the name of the twin skyscrapers that lean towards each other at a sickening angle over the shoulders of television reporters tasked with trying to explain whether last weekend’s €100 ­billion deal was a triumph of robust collective action or — as markets seem to be signalling — another domino-fall in the inevitable disintegration of the single currency.

Conceived in the late 1980s as a showpiece of Spain’s real-estate-fuelled new prosperity, the Madrid project was left unfinished after the collapse of the developer, Grupo Torras, amid accusations of massive fraud involving sovereign funds from Kuwait. A Spanish official memorably remarked in 1993, when Spain had plunged deep into recession, that even if the towers were completed, ‘What the hell would you do with them?’ But they were built out anyway, and one of them eventually became the headquarters of ­Bankia, a savings-bank group that was ruined by bad mortgage lending at cheap euro rates. Bankia duly collected a €19 ­billion bailout of its own last month.

So the leaning-tower vista tells the whole story of Spain’s double boom and bust, and we can only look at it as we look at the euro: why did anyone think this was an elegant design in the first place, and can anything save it if its foundations are unsound? Meanwhile, Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy ran into flak for refusing to acknowledge the bailout, in which eight banks were nationalised, as a ‘rescue’, referring to it only as ‘what happened yesterday’. As the euro tragedy continues to unfold, I fear that’s exactly how it will come to be seen.