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Siglas, and the four layers they belong to
Alex nodding through an interview full of initials is a rite of passage, and Spanish makes it worse than most languages, because Spain writes its public life in acronyms. Some are pronounced as letters, others as words, and the ones that have become words get spelled that way: an ONG is una oenegé, and nobody says the letters. Two conventions help immediately. A doubled letter means a plural: EE. UU. is los Estados Unidos, CC. OO. is the union Comisiones Obreras, and RR. HH. is Recursos Humanos, as on every office door. And many acronyms take a gender from the noun inside them: la DGT, because it is una Dirección General. Most of the acronyms a consultancy uses belong to the layers of Spanish government, and it is worth having the map. At the bottom are the municipios, more than eight thousand of them, each run by an ayuntamiento and an alcalde or alcaldesa; more than half have under a thousand inhabitants. Above them, in most of the country, sit the fifty provinces and their diputaciones provinciales, which exist to support small municipalities with roads, water and services, and which are therefore Cierzo's natural clients. The islands and the Basque Country have their own versions, cabildos, consells and diputaciones forales. Above those are the seventeen comunidades autónomas, each with its own parliament and government and large powers over health, education and rural development, and above those, the state. And European money arrives through all of it: FEADER, the EU fund for rural development, is the one Alex will be hearing about for the rest of the year. The practical lesson is Carmen's offer. Nobody in a Spanish office minds being asked what an acronym means, and everyone remembers the year they were the new person nodding.