Local opposition, page-62

People here do not understand the bad connotations that mining has in Spain. I was born and raised in Spain and ended up working for the mining industry in other parts of Europe and I have to say that Spanish people have a very strong opposition towards mining that is not present in other parts of the world (or at least not in most parts). This opposition comes mainly from 2 sources: good old bad practices of mining businesses (we could extend this to most businesses actually) and and economy dependent on tourism.

Spain has still a mentality of "business is bad" coming from a generation of exploitations and abuses by business owners during the dictatorship (and honestly also to this date in many cases) that has left a lingering effect even today. Even if regions are suffering from poverty or lack of economic opportunities, the feeling that most multinational businesses and specially those on extractive industries are ultimately there just for their profit and the minimal economic development is not worth it is very present.

On the second aspect, the region near Caceres is not an industrial center, their economy mostly depend on agriculture/farming (best jamon) and tourism and a few hundreds or thousands jobs for a limited period is not worth it the risk of losing a part of their environment and therefore an important source of tourism revenue. That part of the country is dependent on that beautiful landscape and is not as in other parts of the world where I've seen that mining has brought plenty of jobs long term, since there are more than just a single mining spot and also other industries in the supply chain have settled there. To explain this further, imagine you are in a German town in the Rhine area, a new mine is not going to affect your tourist revenue since there are already plenty of mines and the region does not care about one more hole in the mountain, furthermore that new mine is also bringing other industries to the region, together with other mines and creating a lot of prosperity to the region. In Extremadura, a single mine can do more harm than anything, the region has 0 chances of developing into an industrial center, so they feel like they will just be left there with an environmental problem just to extract lithium for another region to develop, they feel like they are getting the short stick (spoiler, they are). That's why they are against it.

Both of these aspects make it really hard for the project to prosper in my opinion.