In 2003, Spain’s Institute of National Statistics (INE) showed that just over one in four Spanish men under the age of 49 had experienced sex with a prostitute – with one in fifteen having done so within the previous year. This was backed up by Maribel Montano of the ruling PSOE party who claimed in 2007 that: ‘every day 1.5 million men pay for sex’ in Spain. In fact, there are an estimated 300,000 prostitutes working in Spain possibly turning over around 40 billion Euros per year, which roughly equates to the country’s education budget. For good reason, Spain is sometimes dubbed the ‘Brothel of Europe’.
Certainly, the openness and extent of prostitution can be a surprise to north Europeans who still cling to the myth of Spain as a prim and proper, old-fashioned, hard line, Catholic country. This notion is swiftly dispelled as you drive at night along any main road out of a large town or city. In the outskirts, and often close to industrial estates, you will come across brightly lit buildings that normally have a garish neon sign pronouncing ‘Club’. These are brothels in all but name and house, sometimes, up to a hundred or more prostitutes. Called Clubes de Alterne (socialising clubs) by the Spanish, their location and nature are openly known and tolerated by the police, authorities and local population.
The clubs, of course, vary hugely and span the whole spectrum of prostitution from its lowest depths to a brothel system that is reasonably fair and transparent within a deeply emotive industry. At their worst, the Clubes de Alterne are controlled by criminal gangs who have trafficked women from Third World countries on the promise of conventional work. Deprived of their passports and physically intimidated, the women are forced to work as prostitutes, whilst earning their bosses huge sums. Indeed, the International Labour Organisation in 2005 calculated that a forced sex worker would earn 67,200 Euros a year in an industrialised country.
