In the Time of Skinny Cows VALENCIA, SPAIN - A vast theme park south of this coastal city is called Terra Mitica, or mythical land. That is not a bad term these days for Spain, a country rubbing its eyes in post-bubble bewilderment at the alarming cracks in the national edifice. Terra Mitica, in and out of bankruptcy since its opening in 2000, is one product of the Valencia region's giddy building boom fed by cheap money, venal politics and galloping illusion. An underused 14-story opera house perched like an avant-garde spaceship on a lapping pool, a soaring suspension bridge over nothing, and an unused airport at Castellón where pedestrians can picnic on the runway are other examples of the fever for tallest, biggest, grandest that gripped Spain's third city. Valencia was always a little envious of Madrid and Barcelona. Now the tab is in for its delusional swoon. Hosting the America's Cup and Formula 1 races make headlines but not sustainable development. The opera and surrounding complex alone cost over $1 billion. Today signs on Valencia pharmacies say the local government "finds itself - again! - without money to pay for medicines." Schools are starved of cash. In Spain, the euro zone's fourth-largest economy, the good times are those of "vacas gordas," or fat cows, and the lean years those of "vacas flacas," or thin cows. Hispanic cattle, no longer fed on funny money, are super-skinny in this season of bust and brooding. Valencia, like most of Spain's 17 autonomous communities, is heavily in debt. It needs money from Madrid. The central government, headed by the hesitant Mariano Rajoy of the center-right People's Party, in turn needs money from the European Union - and perhaps an international bailout. As for Spaniards, they just need money from wherever: 15,000 of them lined up the other day outside offices of John Deere, the U.S. agricultural machinery manufacturer, after 150 jobs were advertised. One way to look at Spain is as Europe in miniature: Threatened by crack-up, constitutionally flawed, uncertain of the relationship between central and regional powers, awakening to structural flaws under the pressure of economic crisis and high unemployment. Separatist Catalan nationalism is nothing new; what is new is the spur given it by sharp financial pressures that provoke resentment - especially when the right, with its centralizing instincts, is in power. Catalonia is, with Valencia, Spain's most indebted region. In Spain, even a couple of generations on from the death of that ruthless centralizer Francisco Franco, it never takes much to stir historical wounds. It was precisely to assuage such wounds - to triangulate old problems - that the European Union was created. Spain's membership, long embraced with enthusiasm but now sometimes questioned, remains an important source of stability. Crisis may also be a form of growing pain, for Spain as for Europe. Old habits will have to die and new models emerge. I'd wager that Spain, like General Motors, is too big to fail. The old Spanish model went something like this: Cheap money poured into the country from Brussels and European banks; a building boom fed by foreign demand from sun-starved North Europeans and a welter of dubious mortgages turned the coast into a construction site; regional politicians, in cozy relationships with the local savings banks known as "cajas," could not find an airport or high-speed train or luxury condominium they didn't want to build, however superfluous; layers of administration, from local to central, multiplied waste and obfuscated fraud; long after danger signs started flashing in Madrid the government opted, on the Citicorp model, to dance until the music stopped. "We were very slow to react," said Joaquín Moya-Angeler Cabrera, a prominent businessman. When a politician wanted to get rid of another the consolation prize was always to become at least director, if not chairman, of a local savings bank. In Valencia, as elsewhere, the lack of professional bankers took a toll. Banco de Valencia went under, was rescued by the central government, and is now being sold off. Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo (CAM), collapsed after it was found to be more than $10 billion in the red, but not before its executives helped themselves to millions. Another savings bank, Bancaja, was forced to merge. A previous version of this column incorrectly referred to the former Spanish currency as the peso. It was the peseta.