Spanish News Today Editors Roundup Weekly Bulletin Nov 10

FEATURED ARTICLES: "Spain could finally have new government next week" and "New Spain flights announced at London Travel Forum"

This weekend is Armistice weekend, with 11/11 falling on Saturday and Remembrance Sunday the day after. Brits and Commonwealth subjects around the world mark this day as the day in 1918 when the Armistice deal was signed that signalled the end of the First World War. It is a time to remember, with a minute’s respectful silence, those who have passed away in defence of the values we hold dear, and to reaffirm our revulsion towards the violence of war and terror, sentiments which sadly are just as important to hold in mind now as they were 105 years ago.

The Spanish don’t really recognise the event or mark it in any way, as such. It’s not really their thing. But towns and cities around the country with large UK expat communities will, out of respect, join in events for the day, such as those in Torrevieja, Camposol and on the New Sierra Golf Resort.

And the links between the UK and Spain could hardly be stronger right now, with the World Travel Forum being celebrated in London right now throwing up loads of new promises of touristy goodness between the two nations.

However, the spirit of peace and harmony that Poppy Day is supposed to inspire feels distinctly lacking in Spain right now, what with the protests in the streets every night, shooting (?!) and the controversial road to power for the new government…

New Spain flights announced at London Travel Forum

The annual World Travel Market (WTM) was taking place this week in London, and it’s a trades fair where travel industry hotshots come together to try to outshout each other every year about why their area is best for tourists to visit. It’s also a chance for networking between tour operators, tourism boards, airlines and more, and it has given rise to some announcements this week which were warmly welcomed by travellers.

Not least of these was the news from easyJet about Alicante-Elche Airport, where it is setting up a new seasonal base and which is quickly becoming one of the busiest airports in Spain for British and international travellers.

easyJet is making sure passengers are spoiled for choice with 9 brand-new destinations on offer for summer 2024. Specifically, these new routes will be:

Southampton
Newcastle
Belfast
Zurich
Prague
Lyon
Lille
Nantes
Nice

In total, easyJet will have 1.5 million seats for sale from Alicante for the 2024 summer season, which is an increase of around 10% compared to the 2023 summer season. This enables the creation of around 100 direct jobs between pilots and crew with 3 aircraft based at the airport.

Not only that, but the Valencian Community has vowed to officially repeal its controversial tourist tax, which was set to charge tourists 1 euro a night to stay in the region. The scrapping of the supplement means that holidays to the Costa Blanca will be that much cheaper, a welcome piece of news for travellers who are already paying through the nose for more expensive flights than ever.

The Valencia tourist tax was approved by the government last December with the aim of promoting sustainable tourism, but the new regime are going to force through a fast-track repeal of the measure as a mater of urgency.

Meanwhile, there was another exciting announcement at the WTM by the Provincial Council of Almería that Almería Airport will have a new flight connection to the United Kingdom once a flight path Almería-Bristol is added.

Almería already has weekly flights to London Gatwick Airport, as well as several other European and Spanish destinations, but in reality it is a small airport. As such, a new connection with an important destination like the UK, which sends more holidaymakers to Spain than anywhere else, is a massive boon for Almería.

Since the announcement was just a brief victory speech at the trades fair, however, details are still thin on the ground. We don’t know, for instance, when the Almería-Bristol flights will start, nor how often they will run, and it’s also important to find out whether they will be available all year round or only for the summer high season.

Public transport discounts to continue next year

Fancy staying on the ground? If buses and trains are your preferred mode of transport, then you’re in luck. The Spanish government is considering making its hugely successful public transport scheme discount for commuter trains and buses permanent.

Since September 2022, travel passes on local overground Cercanías and Rodalíes trains in Spain have been free for people who make at least 16 journeys in four months, while medium distance Media Distancia trains have been discounted by up to 60% for regular travellers.

On buses and coaches, there are also discounts of up to 60% or even 100% after the government promised to subsidise 30% if the autonomous communities would raise the discounts to 50%.

Now, the acting government has promised that it will extend this promotion at least until the end of 2024 – and possibly longer – if it manages to hold onto power for another four years, of which more presently…

…I beg your pardon?

Okay, so I know I said no more politics, but when daily protests are taking place in cities across the country, a never-before-seen deal is struck that could set a dangerous precedent for the next 20 years of Spanish civil life and a man gets shot in the face, we can make an exception, can’t we?

This all centres around the amnesty deal, in which the current government has been negotiating to grant pardons to over a thousand suspected ‘traitors to the crown’ over their part in the illegal Catalonian referendum to gain independence from Spain.

That referendum was held in Catalonia in 2017. It was neither legally binding – because it hadn’t been given permission to be held by the central government in Madrid – nor could it be said to be representative since many people did not vote as they knew full well it was illegal and would bear no fruit.

Having flouted the Spanish Constitution, then-leader of the Catalonian parliament, Carles Puigdemont, fled into exile in Brussels. As leader of the influential Junts party, this is the man who now holds the key to whether Spain will have another four years of Socialist coalition government.

He’s been holding out on acting President Pedro Sánchez for a while now, making the Prez sweat and work and give up more and more in return for parliamentary support to back a coalition government. Which he has finally done this week, meaning the formalisation of a settled government structure could finally be announced by Sánchez’s PSOE party as soon as next week, just 4 short months after they lost the election.

Understandably, not everyone is best pleased about this. Anti-amnesty demonstrators have been protesting outside PSOE offices up and down the country, with some of these scenes turning ugly and violent. Strong words have been thrown around, with the right using phrases like “a violation of the rule of law”, “the greatest attack on democracy in our history”, “a coup d'état to the Constitution” and “socialist terrorists”.

Indeed, it is likely that in years to come Spain will pay a heavy price for the left’s capitulations in its desire to cling onto power. There is the controversial inclusion in the amnesty deal of ‘lawfare’ – the use of legal and judicial systems and institutions to silence, damage or delegitimise political opponents – which if permitted could open a whole can of worms for the future of Spanish politics. But possibly the most pressing side-effect of the pact could be the possibility of a new – and this time state-sanctioned – referendum in Catalonia on whether or not the autonomous region should secede from Spain and form its own country.

As if all that weren’t enough, things got really dramatic this Thursday when the former leader of the conservative Partido Popular (PP) political party in Catalonia and one of the founding members of the far-right Vox group, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, was shot in the face in broad daylight on a city centre street in Madrid.

The 78-year-old ex-politician was shot on Calle Núñez de Balboa in the capital’s high-end Salamanca district at around half past one in the afternoon. Witnesses said the shooter was wearing a black motorcycle helmet when he walked straight up to Vidal-Quadras, shot him in the face with a 9mm Parabellum pistol and hopped onto a Yamaha motorbike waiting nearby to make his getaway.

Everything points to this being a planned attack, and despite Tweeting just hours before the attack, “Our nation will cease to be a liberal democracy and become a totalitarian tyranny. We Spaniards will not allow it”, Vidal-Quadras himself regained consciousness in hospital and apparently told police that he thought Iran was behind the assassination attempt due to his links with the Iranian opposition movement. He was actually one of the first ever politicians that Tehran put on its list of terrorists.

Stay tuned next week to find out whether there finally is a new government or not, because not all the boxes have been checked just yet...

Murcia

Our Murcia section this week starts with a couple of mishaps on the road, firstly with the driver who ploughed into the Mazarrón Country Club entrance post’s automatic barrier last Saturday afternoon. It seems the driver suffered a fainting episode while at the wheel but luckily escaped relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for the car, which suffered frontal damage and had to be taken away by a tow truck, and the barrier equipment, which will require repairs.

Not quite four full days later, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, another car drove straight into the waters of the Mar Menor near San Javier, with the absent-minded driver claiming they had just been following the directions from their GPS. They must not have noticed, while they were looking at their SatNav, that they had driven down the boat ramp and into the water for at least 10 metres. It took the tow truck 3 hours to pull the car from the water.

Back to Mazarrón Country Club, though, and a collection of 24 land plots are up for grabs in a Spanish state auction, which is to be held in three weeks’ time. The lots were entered into the auction by an insolvency administrator through the Murcia bankruptcy court, suggesting that the original developer’s assets are being liquidated.

The plots range in size from just 324m2 to over 20,000m2, and are variously classified as either building plots and 6 as ‘Espacios libres’ (Free spaces). Interested buyers can place ‘secret bids’ up until November 27 to try to win any of them.

Development potential for property investors there, perhaps, while the first new build apartments on the Condado de Alhama resort are already nearing completion. These are from property developers Alhama Nature, who are building a sort of a ‘resort within the resort’, which is also to be called Alhama Nature.

They have announced that the first 32 homes of this new development will be ready for delivery by the end of January 2024, with a further 228 homes planned in total. Since these properties are being built ‘to order’, construction work does not begin until the property is reserved as they are adapted according to the purchasers’ requirements. So far, work has already begun to build 90 homes, and it is expected that this number will climb to three figures before the end of 2023, with not just apartments but bungalows and villas available too.

In the coming months, Alhama Nature are preparing to propose extending the project with new plans for the resort, which involve creating an area to include not only housing, but also health and sports services.

On that other great golf resort in the Region of Murcia, La Manga Club, the newly reopened Grand Hyatt is getting off to a grand start, having won the award for Best Golf Resort in Europe at the European Hotel Awards 2023 “for its sporting excellence and its exclusive golf offering”. It’s certainly a great honour for the resort, which has won other distinctions over the years including Best International Resort by Golf Digest magazine and Best Resort in Spain by Condé Nast Traveler, among many others.

And it’s true that since the Grand Hyatt threw open its newly refurbished doors La Manga Club has gone from strength to strength, standing on the shoulders of the hotel giant to improve its facilities, host prestigious golf tournaments (like last week’s Farmfoods Senior competition) and increase international marketing efforts. But golfers may be left wondering if it’s a bit of a stretch to call it the best golf resort in all of Europe, given the stiff competition in that field, and whether the award isn’t just some PR stunt.

When picking up the award, Ángel Holgado, Director of the Grand Hyatt La Manga Club Golf & Spa, said, “This recognition motivates us to continue improving the experience of our guests and golf lovers.”

In more golf news, the Golf Federation of the Region of Murcia (FGRM) has signed a new sponsorship agreement with the Universae Institute of Higher Education for the ‘Superliga Región de Murcia’ golf competition, which will be renamed ‘II Superliga Universae’. These new, rebranded tournaments will be held between January and September on La Manga Club, as well as on the Golf Altorreal, La Serena, Lorca Golf, La Torre, Hacienda del Álamo, La Roda and New Sierra Golf courses. The new sponsors hope that in 2024 the federation competition will be extended to the Altaona and Alhama Signature courses too.

Finally, in shopping news, a date has been set for the opening of the eagerly anticipated new Primark superstore in Lorca’s Parque Almenara shopping mall. Everyone’s favourite bargain store will open its doors on Tuesday November 21 at 10am, and don’t be surprised if there are die-hard Primark fans already queuing up and waiting outside by 9.45am. This marks store number 3 for Primark in Murcia, and its 60th in Spain, and boasts six self-service checkouts.

Over in Cartagena’s Espacio Mediterráneo shopping centre, where one of the other two Murcia Primarks are located, work has begun this week to improve the parking, traffic circulation and pedestrian facilities around the mall. The Parque Mediterráneo, which surrounds the centro comercial and includes not only the stores that face outward from it but the car park and open-air leisure areas, was purchased by French company Frey last year.

They have pledged to revamp the site according to the French ‘Promenade’ concept, which they are implementing in all the commercial spaces they own, by widening the footpaths, reorganising road traffic and creating shaded areas by planting more trees. They will also make a large children’s area in the centre, restructure the car park with spaces to recharge electric vehicles, more disabled parking spots and improved road markings “with the aim of increasing traffic safety and vehicle accessibility”.

Check out our EVENTS DIARY to see events coming up in the Region of Murcia:

Spain

The summery weather has extended well into autumn this year and the thermometers really only began to drop at the beginning of November. This side-effect of climate change has had an unexpected impact on the medical field, whose professionals have reported virtually no cases of the usual respiratory complaints usually seen at this time of year.

A report from the National Epidemiological Surveillance Network shows that in the last three weeks, the positivity rate of Covid has hit 13.3%, flu stands at 2.1% and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes a range of bronchial complaints, has reached just 0.7%.

These figures are quite staggering when compared to 2022, when the weather wasn’t quite so mild. At this exact same time last year, SARS-CoV-2 positivity was 12%; flu, 14%; and RSV, 3.6%.

Covid aside, all of the other usual seasonal illnesses are way down, but the experts predict a sharp upswing as the cooler days begin to set in. In the absence of coronavirus safety measures like masks, flu in particular could make a comeback, although this disease usually first hits in the middle of December and lasts until February or March.

According to the Spanish Vaccinology Association, last year respiratory diseases were the third leading cause of death in Spain, resulting in 42,979 fatalities. To prevent such worrying numbers in 2023, the organisation has launched ‘The best plan for this winter’ campaign to raise awareness of the importance of vaccination in people over 60 years of age and younger people with more vulnerable health.

While the mild temperatures might be keeping certain epidemics at bay, the weather has been anything but settled in the last couple of weeks, and one British cruise liner found itself sailing right into the eye of a vicious storm, traumatising the 980 passengers on board.

The Spirit of Discovery was headed for the Canary Islands as part of a two-week cruise when it hit the freak maritime storm in the middle of the Bay of Biscay. 10-metre waves rocked the ship like a toy boat and furniture and passengers went flying as the captain was forced to come to a complete halt and wait it out. Some 18 hours later, the cruise was cut short and the liner headed for safety at Portsmouth.

In the meantime, though, around 100 people were injured in the horrifying ordeal, as described by one terrified passenger:

“The medics were overrun. My mum saw someone being resuscitated, there were broken bones, people on stretchers and people crying including the crew, who were running around frantically trying to help everyone. It was petrifying.

“People were sleeping with life jackets on and writing messages home to loved ones in case we didn’t get back.”

British cruise ship "Spirit of Discovery" in a storm in the Bay of Biscay (November 2023).
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All of the injured guests were treated by medical staff on board and the cruise ship made it safely back to the UK.

If that’s enough to put you off sea travel for a while, how about jetting across the continents faster than the speed of sound? According to one US company, this might well be possible within the decade aboard their hypersonic planes, which will be capable of making the journey from Madrid to New York in just 90 minutes.

Hermeus is developing a range of aircraft capable of reaching speeds of up to 6,000 km/h, five times the speed of sound; the new hypersonic commercial planes will be the fastest in the world, capable of carrying 125 passengers.

These jets will take the place of Concorde, once the fastest and most prestigious brand of air travel on the planet, which used supersonic flight to achieve their incredible speeds.

Concorde was finally taken out of commission in 2003 but the beginning of the end dates back to July 25, 2000, when an Air France jet crashed after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, killing all 109 passengers and crew on board, in addition to four civilians on the ground.

Alicante

It’s been a rather disappointing summer for visitors to the Orihuela Costa, many of whom were shocked to discover that at the height of the season, all of the area’s beaches were left without beach bars, sunbeds, umbrellas, water sports, and even bathrooms for a time.

This was down to a mess being made once again of the contracts for chiringuitos, and since a solution still seems a long way off, residents were treated to the disheartening sight of the beach bars being pulled down this week without even having opened for a day.

The impact was deeply felt by local businesses, who despairingly watched potential customers flock to other nearby resorts where full facilities were on offer.

The last government promised to have the problems ironed out in time for Easter, but this never came to fruition. The plan for next year, however, is to divide up the services (bars and water sports) into five different lots rather than having one company manage everything. The next lease holders will be allowed to take over a maximum of two lots, and the prices will vary depending on which chiringuitos are judged to be the most profitable.

While no date has yet been given for the reopening of the beach bars, a government source claims that an agreement “is very close.”

Anyone who has spent time in Spain will be familiar with the expression mañana: a word which simply means ‘tomorrow’ in English but which really suggests that a job has been put on the long finger. Cabo Roig residents are beginning to understand the true meaning of this, since the beloved cliff walk between Aguamarina and Cala Caleta still hasn’t been reopened despite the project getting the green light at the beginning of September.

The dispute over this little corridor of land which forms a promenade over the sea has been raging for two decades. The short stretch of the coastal path passes directly in front of the Bellavista urbanisation, whose residents were given permission in 2021 to block off the walk at both ends to outside pedestrian traffic.

While that’s understandable enough, it splits the path in the middle, forcing people to walk a kilometre out of their way to rejoin the coast.

However, on September 7 of this year, with all appeals exhausted, the authorities were given permission to expropriate the land and open it to the public.

Those hoping to see council workers tearing down the wall have been disappointed, however, and there’s unlikely to be any quick resolution, since the Bellavista owners will almost certainly delay the expropriation.

Andalucía

As well as the new UK flight connection mentioned earlier, work is moving ahead for another long-awaited transport link in Almería.

Exactly three years ago, in November 1993, Almería City Council first drew up its proposal for the remodelling of the railway access to the city. Since then, plans have been delayed endlessly.

Until now, as the second phase of the project to bring the AVE high-speed train connection to the city, which involves moving the railway tracks underground, could begin any day now. Much excitement was caused when workmen were seen this week putting up one of those official billboard-style signs near the train tracks announcing the work to take place.

Right now, the railway tracks in Almería run straight through the city in two, fairly cutting it in half and meaning motorists and pedestrians have to take a long detour either around them or over one of a pair of high bridges. Loads of other cities in Spain have already buried their train tracks underground long ago, freeing up space above ground for people and traffic and improving train connections with other cities enormously. Almería has sadly long been lacking in this department and the public transport links are accordingly thin on the ground.

Now, though, with the impending start of work on the AVE project, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, but it’s a light that’s still a long way off as the project is expected to take three years.

With so much doom and gloom in the world it’s a welcome change to find a story with a happy ending and one little dolphin got a second chance this week thanks to the quick-thinking actions of two Almeria sailors.

Brothers Miguel and José Ramón were sailing in Aguadulce when they spotted the young calf floundering in the sea, hopelessly tangled in illegal fishing nets. Its panicked mother was desperately trying to shove him to the surface to no avail, which is when the men stepped in.

The boys slowly and carefully pulled the boat up alongside the dolphins and one was able to lasso the calf’s tail. He gently lifted it part of the way out of the water, snagged the net and set the baby free.

The heroic duo were soaked to the skin after their dramatic rescue but thrilled they had been in the right place at the right time to save the day.

La cruda realidad de las redes y nasas de pesca ilegales. Esta cría de delfín tuvo suerte pero por desgracia mueren muchos delfines cada año por esta mala praxis.@guardiacivil @E112Andalucia @FBiodiversidad @mitecogob @gcalmeriaopc #almeria #Aguadulce #ghostfishing #ilegalnets pic.twitter.com/btYMgiDH1k
— Asociación Equinac (@Equinac_org) November 1, 2023

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