Four weeks after spearheading a protest against unemployment and economic woes that took Spain by storm, demonstrators on Sunday dismantled their sprawling encampment in a major Madrid square.
Protesters said the end of the camp in Puerta del Sol square did not mean the end of their movement, which began May 15 and spread from Madrid to city squares nationwide as word spread on Twitter and Facebook.
Some of the demonstrators, who call themselves the "indignant", folded up the blue and green plastic sheets that had sheltered them. Others took hammers to the wooden stalls. Many scraped away stickers and posters plastered to the transparent sides of the Sol metro station.
"We're recycling what we can. The rest we are throwing away,'' said one protester carrying a pile of boards as a human chain formed to ferry mattresses, cupboards, shelves, plastic chairs and plastic cans to municipal cleaning trucks.
"This is my work table. I am going to keep it as a souvenir,'' said camp cook Rafael Rodriguez Ballesteros, a 56-year-old unemployed restaurateur, as he gazed at the folding table before going home.
"I am very touched by all the kindness from these young people,'' he said.
At the peak of the protests ahead of May 22 local elections, tens of thousands of people had packed city squares across Spain to decry welfare cuts, corruption and a jobless rate of 21.29 percent in the first quarter of 2011 _ the highest in the industrialised world.
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