Baton-wielding riot police and demonstrators clashed in central Madrid on Wednesday as Spain held a general strike as part of a Europe-wide anti-austerity protest.

Across Spain meanwhile, an interior ministry spokeswoman said that by late morning police had arrested 62 people and 34 people had been injured in "isolated incidents," 18 of them police.

Spain's top daily newspaper El Pais began delivering redundancy notices on Monday to nearly one-third of its staff including some of the paper's best-known writers.

Last month El Pais, part of heavily indebted Spanish media group Prisa, announced there would be 129 layoffs and 20 early retirements, bringing the total number of job cuts to 149 out of about 460 staff.

Spain's banks announced Monday they will freeze mortgage-related evictions for two years in cases of extreme need as a public outcry mounted over suicides by desperate homeowners.

The lenders reacted after two suicides in 15 days by indebted homeowners facing expulsion in Spain, where both banks and borrowers were hammered by a 2008 property crash.

The Labor Ministry says the number of people registered as unemployed in Spain jumped by 128,242 people in October as the country's recession continues to take its toll.

The ministry said in a statement Monday that a little over 4.83 million were registered as jobless at the end of last month, an increase of 2.7 percent on September.

Spanish shepherds led a flock of more than 2,000 sheep through central Madrid on Sunday in defense of ancient grazing, migration and droving rights threatened by urban sprawl and modern agricultural practices.

Many tourists and residents were surprised to see traffic cut to allow the ovine parade to bleat its way across some of Madrid's most upscale urban streets.

Hundreds of Spanish police officers protested outside the interior ministry in Madrid on Saturday to denounce budget cuts and the elimination of benefits, as firecrackers burst into the air.

Like all Spanish civil service employees, police officers are taking the full blow of the austerity measures brought in by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's right-wing government in a bid to tackle the debt crisis.

Massive extraction of groundwater helped unleash an earthquake in southeastern Spain last year that killed nine people, injured at least 100 and left thousands homeless, geologists said on Sunday.

The finding adds a powerful piece of evidence to theories that some earthquakes are human-induced, they said.

Crisis-hit savers in Spain are transferring their money to Switzerland for safety, the head of Geneva's 80-strong banking association said on Wednesday.

"The (Spanish) clients have deliberately chosen to place their money in Switzerland because they no longer have confidence in Spanish banks," Bernard Droux, president of Geneva Financial Center, told reporters.

Spain has won breathing space but nothing more, analysts said Wednesday, after it escaped feared downgrade of its debt to junk-bond status.

Even if Madrid secures a rescue in which the European Central Bank buys its bonds so as to lower borrowing costs, Spain will be left with deep-seated economic problems unresolved, economists said.

Catalonia president Artur Mas, who is pushing for independence for his northeastern region from the rest of Spain, on Tuesday said the deal for a referendum on Scotland's independence sets a "standard at the international level".

"I am writing to express my congratulations, and those of the Government of Catalonia, on the historic accord reached between you and the First Minister of Scotland making it possible for the Scottish people to hold a referendum before the end of 2014 to decide their future," Mas wrote in a letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron.