The Second Republic sparked considerable enthusiasm concerning the possibilities that a large-scale permanent redistribution of landed property could resolve the social problems in southern Spain. Yet, as this chapter argues, land reform failed because there was insufficient uncultivated land that could be brought under the plough, and labour-intensive agriculture was not feasible under dry-farming conditions. Indeed, cereal cultivation was becoming increasingly capital intensive, especially on the heavy, fertile Campiña soils. The slow and limited progress of settlements under the 1932 Reform Law contrasts with the land invasions in the spring of 1936, which resulted in over a hundred thousand peasants receiving almost immediately over half a million hectares. However they failed to solve the overriding problem of insufficient land and, because weak state capacity implied that land settlements could not be implemented impartially, they simply changed which authority decided who was to benefit, and who was to be excluded.

This final chapter therefore attempts to answer two questions that are crucial to explaining why so many people had become disillusioned with parliamentary democracy. First, it shows why apparently modest reforms, such as the introduction of collective bargaining or the providing of emergency assistance to workers through temporary land settlements, become so contentious and, in particular, why employers and labour organizations were so intransigent. Second, it explains why conflicts became widespread across Spain, appearing not just in areas of latifundios, but also in villages where land was not heavily concentrated. After briefly examining the theoretical literature on rural conflicts and the scale and scope of contentious behavior in the Spanish countryside between 1931 and 1936, it looks at case studies of conflicts involving casual harvest labourers in Southern Spain, and tenant farmers or yunteros in Extremadura.