The global economic collapse is mirrored in the collapse of the symbiotic relationship between the Spanish economy and British Expats.

Much more than other EU countries, Spain has felt the pain of the 2009 economic meltdown. Those aged 18 – 30 are making history by being the first generation of Spaniards to be guaranteed a lower quality of life than their parents.

This is the generation of the mileuristas; well-educated, middle-class young people who are working (if they are lucky enough to work) in jobs that pay a mere one thousand Euros a month. With the average mortgage payment peaking in 2008 at €1300 per month, even the now more affordable €700 average payment is a distant dream.

This is the housing paradox in Spain now. Thousands of houses and apartments stand empty, foreclosed on or abandoned semi-built by bankrupt developers, while a generation of mileuristas face the prospect of living in their parents' homes long past the age of independence.

These thousands of empty homes are a testament to the power of the expatriate in Spain's housing market. Specifically, the power of the British expatriate. More than 50% of expatriate homes are owned by Brits. With the sterling and the Euro at near parity, and the Spanish housing market tainted by claims of corruption and greed, British money is being called home.

While more than 70% of expats in Spain choose to live closely with their Spanish neighbours, the rest opt for an address in one of the 'Expat Ghettos.' Dotted around the Spanish Mediterranean coast, these enclaves are semi-shrines to the signifiers of British life: Pubs, fish and chips, sunscreen and baked beans in every store, and English as the unofficial language. The resident mix in the ghetto is pretty varied: Expat corporate workers, retirees and families (one in five of whom choose to send their children to English-speaking International Schools that offer the curriculum of the Home Country), but all are feeling the pinch.

The numbers of residents in the ghettos and their surrounding townships have traditionally swelled in summer – the percentage of holidaymakers in Spain has always favoured the British, who arrive in their thousands to take advantage of the exchange rate and soak up a little of the Spanish idyll during the traditional two-week holiday.

Now the figures tell a very different story. British holidaymakers are either staying close to home, opting for the cooler but less expensive Scotland, Wales and Ireland or taking their sun in the cheaper Turkey and Morocco.

The expats are leaving too. La Crisis has been difficult for British expats in Spain, especially the retirees. Spanish homes are not built to cope with winter, and despite the brochures full of sunny vistas, winter in Spain can be hard. Simply heating a home for six months of the year is a major hidden expense of living here, particularly for bones that feel the frost more keenly than others. Retirees face up to a 30% loss of income as the sterling collapses against the Euro, and now it is becoming less a matter of choosing a location for their Twilight Years and more a matter of simple survival.

Families too are being called home, as UK corporations pull out of a bleak Spanish market. International schools are reporting a sharp drop in new enrolments and a significant number of enrolment withdrawals among existing students.

In the Expat Ghettos, bars and restaurants are boarding their windows, real estate agencies are being foreclosed upon at the same rate as individual mortgagees and those who are left in the urbanisations are becoming strongholds of one – surrounded by empty homes, abandoned construction sites and an increasingly desperate local population that is turning to crime as the unemployment rates spike.

In sharp contrast to the perception of British expats as relatively wealthy, with a high disposable income, local charity agencies are reporting a massive increase in assistance applications from expats, many of whom simply do not have enough money to feed themselves, much less support the local businesses that survived on the expat Euro.

In fact, the only expat-related industry that is doing well is Removals, with companies from all over Europe (and particularly the UK) reporting a massive increase in enquiries from expats who are choosing, or being forced to return home, to either live with relatives or hope that their government will be able to take care of them.

As many expat retirees rely on a combination of pensions, stock and home equity to fund their retirements, it is no surprise that the crisis has seen many of them in dire straits. Unsold and unsellable Spanish homes mean that although a house may be worth money on paper, there is no tangible comfort to be had in a stagnant market. Similarly, the share market is slow to recover, and the former quarterly windfalls in the form of dividends have either dried up to a trickle or turned red as the international money-bleed is tipped to continue through 2011 and beyond.

With so much of Spain's economy relying on the British coin, it would be easy to assume that the Spanish government would sympathise with this new destitution. That assumption would be wrong.

British expats in Spain now live in the same kind of no-man's land that political asylum seekers and recent immigrants face in Britain. The inherently racist attitudes to outsiders in the UK (suspicion at best and outright abuse at worst) is now at work against against British expats. Increased crime in Expat Ghettos is being dismissed by Spanish politicians, in comments that heavily imply it is an expat's own fault for not being more proactive about assimilation. In other words, 'thankyou for your money, but your problems are your own. If you choose to live as a foreigner, you choose to be treated as one.' With the unemployment rate among the mileuristas nudging twenty per cent, the plight of hungry expats is pretty far down the list of local priorities.

The UK government is not much help either. With the recession eating further into the British economy, Brits who have elected to leave home shores are treated as deserters – the same welfare rights extended to British residents do not necessarily apply to expats. In fact, in 2009 there was a major campaign mounted against expats, encouraging them to blow the whistle on any expat suspected of claiming British entitlements they are ineligible for.

This hostile attitude is, in part, understandable. The vocal minority of British expats who enjoyed all of the comforts of sun and inexpensive living while moaning endlessly about local 'laziness' and the annoyances of Spanish bureaucracy have done little to invoke local sympathy in hard times. While many expats do try to learn the language and involve themselves in their community, the slightest hint of a British Imperialist attitude is enough to turn an already proud and defensive people against expats. Now, when the ghetto-dwellers need the help and understanding of their community, it is tragically clear that there is no community to turn to.

There is a negative cycle here. The reluctance of expats to fully assimilate feeds Spain's shunning of the expat community, and the shunning of the expat community feeds the reluctance to assimilate. But the two need each other to survive. Spain's economy depends heavily on the British (tourism and housing are only two sectors of the many hundreds of millions of Euros pumped into Spain by Britain each year), and the cultural shunning of holidaymakers and expats will not improve relations any time soon. The expats who continue to live in Spain need help, for survival as a community and – tragically – individual survival, as illustrated by the recent story of the dead British expat found in his apartment weeks after his slow descent into lonely malnourishment.

Economies inevitably bounce back. Similarly, they inevitably collapse again. The three conditions of healthy capitalism are Boom, Bust and War. While these are as unavoidable as death and taxes, individual attitudes are much more flexible. A stronger push on the part of individual expats to quietly, and humbly assimilate into Spanish life could provide a framework for future cultural understanding in times of need. While cries of 'foul play' may be legitimate among expats who feel abandoned by their home government and their Spanish community, the glaringly obvious truth is that a petty thief is unlikely to break into the home of a known - and well-liked neighbour - no matter what their country of origin is. Similarly, a known and well-liked neighbour will never die forgotten in a Spanish apartment. The beauty of the Spanish 'nosy neighbour' is that he or she is more likely break down your door than passively wonder where you went. Expats who refuse to live in the now-silent ghettos know this first-hand.

The British are famed for their stoicism and commitment to country in times of crisis. Now it remains to be seen if, among British expats, Spain is truly seen as home.