‘You kind of die’: life without power in the Cañada Real, Spain

Little has changed in Europe's largest shantytown since the UN said the lack of electricity violates children's rights' in 2020

Few parts of Europe's largest shantytown speak quite as plainly of the past 12 months as Luisa Vargas's sparse, tidy and dim front room.

A thin curtain hangs across a window cut into the wooden wall to admit a little light, the bookshelves bear the sooty scorches of candles, and a wood-burning stove squats near the door, its chimney punching through a damp scab of ceiling. A big TV sits forlorn and powerless, its place usurped by a portable model perched on a child's chair and powered, in carefully rationed sessions, by a car battery.