But I decided to come back, so I did up the old house and settled in it. I’ve got two small children in the local school, so I’m helping to bring life back to the village” she says.”My aunt has six windmills. That means someone with a basic pension of some €400 a month now has extra €1,000 monthly, or more That’s a big increase. People here are austere folk, used to a hard life, and don’t change their habits. But they indulge themselves with more parties, foreign trips, a better car.”Evani, too, enjoyed the village outing to Santo Domingo two years ago, and to EuroDisney four years ago.

Like many, she struggles to remember other tempting trips on offer, and recalls one to the Arctic to see the House of Father Christmas. “The council chartered a flight to the funeral of the Pope,” she adds, “but they closed the airport in Rome so it had to be cancelled.”The fact that villagers travel together encourages them to sign up, she says “My mother is a widow, and would never travel on her own. But she has a companion and they travel together, and she never misses the annual holidays to Benidorm and the Canaries.”Evani owes her council-funded job – teaching some 40 women basketmaking, collage and painting – to the windmill money. “It’s been well organised, a long-term investment that benefits us all.”She urges me to stay until sunset, to see the horizon dotted with points of light, “like Martians landing.

It’s beautiful”.But it’s still sunny when I leave, and I meet Alfonso Arroyo, 89, in one of the streets. He’s too old to travel now, he confesses, and he long gave up cultivating his small plot. But he reflects with pleasure that, with one windmill, his land is more profitable now than in all the decades he toiled on it by himself with only the help of a horse and cart.. Furious environmentalists have accused Russia of plotting to turn vast swaths of Siberia into a repository for the world’s unwanted nuclear waste in a multi-billion-dollar plan that puts profit before safety. According to Greenpeace the other, Mayak, in Chelyabinsk, western Siberia, should persuade the world that Russia cannot be trusted to look after radioactive waste.Earlier this year Russian prosecutors started a criminal case against the Mayak plant’s managers alleging that liquid nuclear waste had been pumped into the nearby Techa river since 1948, causing alarming rates of leukaemia among locals.Greenpeace used last week’s 19th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine to protest against the nuclear waste plan.