MADRID — Jorge Luis Garcia Garcia got in on the ground floor of Spain's economic bonanza.
Fifteen years ago he was a Peruvian immigrant working two jobs, washing dishes by day and stoking bakery ovens by night. Today he owns a prosperous construction firm, supplies loading trucks to other builders and is about to expand into recycling.
He owns a home and cars and employs other immigrants, as well as a few Spaniards.
"The doors are wide-open here," Garcia said. "If you hop to it, you can get ahead. My friends and relatives in Italy and other parts of Europe, they all want to come here."
From small businesses like Garcia's to behemoth banks like Grupo Santander, Spain's economy has been racking up phenomenal growth, transforming what was once a backwater into the incandescent bright spot of a generally sluggish Europe.
Fueled by consumer spending, easy debt, immigrant labor and a runaway building industry, Spain has been growing well above the European Union average for a decade.
This has given Spaniards and Spanish residents a can-do sense of optimism that has proved contagious to investors and helped apply a new luster even to some of Madrid's more run-down neighborhoods. Here in the capital, construction cranes dot the horizon in just about every direction.
In major cities, Spaniards have given up the once-common siesta and are working longer and harder, or at least more efficiently, than ever before. Unemployment -- once the highest in Europe -- is at a historical low; more jobs are created in Spain than anywhere else on the continent (although, as critics point out, many of those jobs are low-paying and short-term).
Is this boom sustainable? Even as economists are beginning to warn that the party may soon end, newfound Spanish wealth is evident in all sorts of places.
Credit cards, rare until recently, have become very popular. Cafes and restaurants are full every night of the week. The upper-middle class is expanding, and even mid-middle-class families are now likely to have maids and nannies. Sales of luxury vacations and SUVs have soared; among the high-end cars plying Spanish highways it is possible to see the occasional Hummer, still a rarity in most of Europe. Demand is so strong for plastic surgery that the government now includes it in the "shopping basket" of basic goods whose prices are used to calculate inflation and buying power.
