ARCHIVED - Murcia and Spanish news round-up, week ending 10th June 2016

The Isaac Peral sails again but will Corvera ever get off the ground????

Residents of the Costa Cálida will need no telling that this week saw the start of the first heatwave of 2016, with the State meteorological agency Aemet warning that warm air travelling north from the Sahara will push temperatures well above 35 degrees over the next week.

The heat went up a couple of notches on Wednesday and will last until the middle of next week with a brief respite over the weekend, although those living on the coast will welcome the news that a sea breeze is likely to provide a little relief. The worst of the heat is likely to be in Caravaca de la Cruz, Cieza, Jumilla and the regional capital as thermometers soar to seven or eight degrees above the historical average for this time of year.

Coinciding with the arrival of higher temperatures, the regional fire brigade is busy preparing for the summer, and was called out on Tuesday to the small municipality of Albudeite for the third time in a week after a fire was spotted near the River Mula during the morning. 

The regional fire authorities have issued reminders that burning of agricultural waste is now prohibited until the autumn, as is the use of cooking fires and equipment of any nature within the regional parks due to the fire risk.

The arrival of the heat provided a chance to go to the beach on Thursday, which was a regional holiday to commemorate the anniversary of the official recognition of the Region of Murcia as an Autonomous Community in 1982, and unusually in Cartagena this was marked by the hoisting of the flag of La Rioja at various emblematic locations in the city.

This was down to the gestures made by members fo the Convergencia Cívica Cartagena platform group, who support the city and its surrounding area being granted a degree of autonomy from Murcia, and chose to celebrate the holiday in La Rioja instead on the grounds that any region of Spain represents their interests more than that of Murcia.

Thus it was that Thursday dawned with the flag of La Rioja flying outside the regional parliament building on Paseo Alfonso XIII, and at the same time the statues of Carlos III, the painter Vicente Ros, actor Isidoro Máiquez, bullfighter Enrique Cano (“Gavira”) and even the apostle Santiago had the red, white, green and yellow flag of the northern region of La Rioja draped over their shoulders.

Elsewhere, the region enjoyed its annual holiday with a variety of public acts, although most workers just took a day off, the result being a disjointed week on the news front.

Another slight delay at Corvera airport

Pedro Rivera, the new minister for Infrastructures and Development in the regional government of Murcia, met leaders of the business community on Tuesday to discuss progress towards inaugurating key new infrastructures services in the Region, including the new airport in Corvera and the AVE high-speed rail service.

Both the minister and the business community representatives stressed the need to speed up progress regarding the unopened airport in Corvera and the arrival of the AVE high-speed rail network in the Region of Murcia, but José María Albarracín, the president of Croem, expressed the opinion that a further slight delay is probably to be expected at Corvera, with the new management contract at the airport possibly not being put out to tender until after the summer. This, he says, is the result of the political uncertainty prior to the general election on 26th June and the change of personnel in the regional government: Sr Rivera has only just occupied the post previously held by Francisco Bernabé, who is now standing as a candidate for the PP in the national government in the general election. 

The regional government maintains that the complicated judicial processes required to unravel the legal tangle deliberately created by the outgoing concessionary who failed to open the airport in the first place will take time, and that they continue to work through the necessary resolutions to each separate case while continuing with the raft of administrative bureaucracy required to open a new airport.

Agriculture and the economy

Given its size and geographical proximity it is hardly surprising that the most important export market for the Region of Murcia, especially in terms of fresh fruit and vegetables, is France, but over the last five years the UK has consolidated its position as the second largest market with a growth in sales of 64 per cent. 

Last year the revenue for Murcia companies which was generated by exports to the UK reached 956 million euros, representing an increase of 64.42% over the figure from the year 2010

In 2015 503 companies based in the Region of Murcia exported to the UK, and fruit and veg accounted for total revenue of over 617 million euros, or almost two thirds of the overall figure.

Bye bye Bastarreche: Blanca and Cartagena implement the Historical Memory Law

In the first ever referendum to be held in the municipality of Blanca, the residents voted last Friday to decide the new names of the streets and squares in the town which are to be altered in accordance with the Historical Memory Law, which was passed in late 2007.

The Law requires glorifications of the dictatorship of General Franco and his actions during the Civil War to be removed from public places, and in response the street names in Blanca which are to be changed are those of Generalísimo, General Aranda, García Morato, Aranda, José Antonio and Federico Servet.

Reaching this point has been a long and traumatic battle, many councils nationwide dragging their heels and failing to make the changes demanded by the law for a host of reasons. In many cases the administrative hassle of changing dozens of street names and the resulting inconvenience for residents and businesses who have signwritten vans, stationery etc has been given as the reason for failing to implement the changes. Others argue that removing monuments and busts is unnecessary as their relevance is unknown to the majority of the population and visitors and in other cases there is simply a reluctance to undertake a "whitewashing " of Spanish history.

Cartagena has been the subject of many spirited tussles between those campaigning to remove the references to the period of dictatorship from the city and the former Mayoress, but since the change in power brought about by the May elections last year, a concerted attempt has been made to comply with the law. This week, following a period of consultation, the Town Hall began work on Tuesday to rid the city of statues and street names which had been deemed as inappropriate, removing statues of Admiral Bastarreche and General José López-Pinto. The Bastarreche bust in particular, has been at the centre of controversy for several years and its removal is viewed as a significant victory by those campaigning for the full application of this controversial law.

The statues will now be stored in municipal warehouses pending a decision regarding what will become of them in the future.

Tourism news

The latest tourist spending figures which were published on Monday by the national government’s central statistics unit show that during the first four months of this year the amount spent in the Region of Murcia by visitors from abroad came to 221.5 million euros, the highest total ever for the period between 1^stJanuary and 30^th April.

While on the one hand this accounts for only 1.24% of the national total of 17,900 million euros, it is nonetheless an encouraging sign as it coincides with what is traditionally the “off season” for tourism in the Region of Murcia and the beaches of the Costa Cálida. This point is emphasized by Juan Hernández, the minister for Tourism in the regional government, who points to the success of campaigns to de-seasonalize and tourism in Murcia and to attract visitors from a wider variety of countries.

In the first four months of the year visitors from the UK accounted for by far the largest share of all tourist spending, the figure of 76.5 million euros representing 34.6% of the overall total. That this is a smaller proportion than in 2015 (37.9%) is due not to British visitors spending less, but to those from other countries spending more, and in the first third of the year the second biggest spenders were those from Scandinavia, who accounted for 15.1% of the total.

The other main contributors were those visiting the Costa Cálida from France (up from 7.8% to 11.8%), Germany (10.3%), the Netherlands (5.1%) and Belgium (4.2%), and all of these countries have increased their share in comparison with the first four months of 2015.

At the same time, during April Murcia’s proportion of spending by foreign visitors in the whole of Spain rose to 1.64%, an encouraging sign for the summer season which is about to start.

Meanwhile, the tourism authorities in the Region of Murcia continue in their efforts to attract more visitors from a wider variety of countries in northern Europe, and as part of this campaign a delegation visited Stockholm presenting the Costa Cálida to Swedish journalists and tour operators.

This week the regional government also presented the results of a study carrie out into the economic impact of golf tourism in the region, highlighting the contribution made by golf to de-seasonalizing tourism in Murcia and providing stable year-round jobs, as well as the economic importance of golf tourism to the regional economy.

The start of the summer weather coincided this week with the handing over of Q for Quality flags to many Costa Cálida beaches, and on Tuesday Mazarrón Mayoress Alicia Jiménez was among those travelling to Madrid, in her case to collect the six Q for Quality flags corresponding to beaches within the municipality.

Crime and punishment

The Policía Nacional have detained a Bulgarian minor for stealing 500 euros from a charity donations box at one of the churches in the city of Murcia. The young man was using a hard plastic tape with adhesive on both sides to extract objects from the Jesús Abandonado donations box, but he was spotted by a member of the public as he was attempting to do so and was caught red-handed by the police.

In Lorca, meanwhile, a 46-year-old Dutchman has been placed under arrest by the Guardia Civil after he was found to be growing marijuana on a country property in Aguaderas, which is just to the south-east of the city Lorca on the road to Mazarrón, while in Cieza a 42-year-old man was stabbed at the Polideportivo Municipal Mariano Rojas where he works on Monday, apparently by a north African man whom he informed that it was not acceptable to make use of the sports centre showers to wash his clothes. 

Environmental news

The Mar Menor has been a constant topic in the news over the last few weeks as agriculturalists, environmentalists and politicians attempt to find a solution to the problems caused by water run-off into the Mar Menor, Europe's largest saltwater lake.

The issue is not so much that water runs into the Mar Menor following rain, but more that this washes agricultural chemicals down from the fields surrounding the shores of the Mar Menor into the water as well, enriching the waters and encouraging a proliferation of micro-organisms. This creates rich feeding grounds for jellyfish and encourages the growth of algae, altering the eco-system.

Preventing this from happening is more complicated than it sounds, as water runs off from a vast area, so stopping agricultural activity is not an option, and as water-run off occurs throughout the year and not just during the peak hours of intensity of the autumn rains, this means that although more storm drains have been built to limit water run-off, further initiatives must also be undertaken ro deal with the problem long-term.

After a hectic fortnight of meetings it has been decided that among the measures which will be taken to protect the Mar Menor from the run-off of water containing nitrates and fertilizers down the Rambla del Albujón is the installation of “green filters”, similar to those which have already proved a success in the wetlands of the Albufera just south of the city of Valencia. 

Once up and running, the filters (consisting of large pools of water) will use natural processes to eliminate contaminating substances from the run-off water which comes from the crop fields of the Campo de Cartagena. This process is achieved by channeling run-off water containing phosphates and other harmful substances into pools where it is effectively decontaminated by the action of sunlight, wind and selected micro-organisms before being allowed to continue its journey to the sea. A proposal to install this system in the Mar Menor was made in 2014 although at that point nothing was agreed on.

This solution has been agreed upon not only by the national government but also by representatives of the regional government, the farmers of the Campo de Cartagena, ecologist groups, water sports clubs and the Confederación Hidrográfico del Segura (CHS), and Adela Martínez-Cachá, the minister for Water, Agriculture and the Environment in the Region of Murcia believes that the first steps could be taken within 15 days.

In the meantime, it is important to highlight the fact that the Mar Menor has not become a toxic dump. This message has been underlined by José María Albarracín of the Region of Murcia business association Croem, who stated on Tuesday morning that Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon is still an attractive place to spend the summer and that while the problem of agricultural contamination is one which must be dealt with, it is important not to send out overly negative messages as the peak tourist season nears. 

Elsewhere, 14 goldfinches and 3 European siskins have been confiscated from a man in Lorca after it was found that they were being illegally kept in cages on the balcony of an apartment in the city. There is no doubting the prettiness of these small birds and their song, in Murcia there is a law which responds to the age-old tradition in the Region of capturing finches and training them as songbirds, a custom which at one point became so widespread that there was a threat to the survival of the population in the wild. 

As for the urban environment, in the city of Murcia the latest mural to be commissioned by the innovative Oficina de Grafiti has been completed outside the municipal swimming pool in the Infante Don Juan Manuel district, which lies on the southern side of the River Segura. The new mural covers 80 square metres of brick wall in Calle Lope de Rueda, and is the result of five days’ work by four graffiti artists.

The Peral submarine rides again

A one-in-five scale model of the world’s first electric-powered submarine, which was designed and built by Isaac Peral and was first launched in 1888, was gently lowered into the water of the port of Cartagena on Tuesday by students and teachers from the Politécnico secondary school.

The model was built by vocational training students over a period of six years, and those present saw how students manoeuvred the 800-kilogram craft by means of a remote control device. The replica is 4.7 metres long and 59 centimetres wide, and was built using Isaac Peral’s original plans and design notes.

What’s on in Murcia

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Murcia property news

The latest residential property sales figures which were published on Thursday by Spain’s central statistics unit (see below) show that in the Region of Murcia the monthly total of 1,112 sales in April represented a 44.2% increase on the same month last year.

This is the fourth most significant rise among the seventeen regions of Spain, and at the same time is the fourth highest monthly total in the Region since 2011.

Encouragement is also not hard to find in the latest property price statistics, which show that the value of property is rising, having gone up in the Region by 2.9% during the twelve months ending on 31st March 2016. This year-on-year increase is the eighth in a row after a downward trend which lasted six years from late 2008, and the most significant in almost nine years. During the first three months of this year prices in the Region of Murcia rose by just 0.05% in comparison to the previous quarter, registering the sixth increase in the last nine quarters.

Spanish national news

Another election campaign begins

Anyone following the Spanish media recently might have thought that the general election campaign began weeks ago, but in fact it was not until Friday 10^th June that it officially got under way.

Despite that, though, throughout the week the press has been dominated by the efforts of the four main political groups to sway indecisive voters as electoral promises are already being made and policies unveiled. On Wednesday many of the headlines were made by Podemos, the new party which has in some quarters been described as an “anti-austerity” movement and which appears now to be living up to that label less than was the case a prior to the inconclusive December election.

Meanwhile, Albert Rivera, the leader of Ciudadanos, the other new party in the national parliament, has proposed that tourism should become a priority of the State and that the English language should be used in all public education, and Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE has proposed gifting two years of social security contributions to new mothers. Acting President Mariano Rajoy of the PP has responded by warning that Spain is in no mood for jokes or experiments, requiring instead a continuity of policy which only his party can provide.

And all of this, remember, comes before the campaign started on Friday….

Unfortunately, the pre-campaigning was also marked this week by a series of acts of vandalism in Zaragoza, the capital of Aragón, which left members of the Izquierda Unida (IU) party more committed than ever to fighting for tolerance, respect and freedom of speech.

On Monday night yellow paint was thrown at the regional head offices of the IU and the UGT and CCOO trades unions in Zaragoza, and regional IU leader Adolfo Barrena commented on Tuesday that it seems that some intolerant members of society have obviously started the campaign early.

Meanwhile, the latest monthly survey carried out by Spain’s Sociological Research Centre reveals that unemployment and corruption remain the two issues which are perceived as most worrying among members of the public, with only 5.2% of the participants naming the political impasse among the three major problems facing Spain.

This week a special report was published asserting that Spain's “auto-pilot” economy is flying high in spite of 6 months without a government, with mention being made of the fact that Alhama de Murcia-based family-owned meat producer El Pozo is pouring 70 million euros into building a new processing plant even as Spain enters its sixth month without a new government and gears up for a repeat election on June 26th.

Apparently, El Pozo is far from alone: click to read full report.

Economic news and tourism

As Spain still struggles to meet the deficit targets set by the EU authorities, the Banco de España has issued a report in which it is forecast that the figure will not fall below the threshold of 3% of GDP until 2018, a year later than has been stipulated by Brussels. 

The tourist sector, meanwhile, shows no signs of slowing down its growth. The amount of money spent in Spain by visitors from abroad rose again in April of this year despite Easter having fallen in March, with the majority of the increase being accountable for by the continuing upward trend in spending by British tourists.

The overall monthly total of 5,647 million euros was 4.3% higher than in April 2015, and within that figure the stand-out increase was the 14% rise in spending by visitors from the UK. During April tourists and other visitors from the UK spent 1,134 million euros in this country, accounting for 20.1% of the total, with the next highest figures corresponding to those coming from Germany (823 million) and France (604 million), where the increases were comparatively small (3% and 5.1% respectively).

Separatism

This has been a difficult week to say the least for the separatist regional government of Catalunya, and now, following the CUP’s decision to block the proposed budget of the government despite the party supposedly sharing the pro-independence policies of the JxSí coalition, regional president Carles Puigdemont has announced that he will bring a motion of confidence in his administration before the Catalan parliament after the summer.

Should this motion not prosper, he has vowed to call another regional election, and at the same time has questioned the motives of the CUP in vetoing the budget this week. 

“If the CUP’s priority was independence”, he added, “we would have a budget by now”, adding that if he had known that this situation was likely to occur he would not have accepted the challenging of leading the regional government of Catalunya. 

This crisis came after the CUP party decided on Tuesday evening to continue vetoing the government budget proposed by the JxSí group, causing worries that the process of separating Catalunya from Spain and forming an independent State could be derailed by the disagreement among the two separatist groups in the regional parliament.

In general the campaign for an independent Catalunya has until now been a peaceful one, but early on Saturday evening an incident of racial violence was directed at two women who were staffing a stand which promotes Spanish sport in general and the national football team in particular. 

Two female staff were shoved to the ground and one was dragged by her hair from the road to the pavement as the attackers accompanied their actions with shouts making it clear that their violence was in response to the women’s open support for Spain and Spanish sport.

In the Basque Country, meanwhile, eleven years after the authorities in Guipuzcoa (as it is spelt in Castilian Spanish) removed the Spanish flag from the balcony of the government building in San Sebastián the Supreme Court of Spain has ruled that they were not entitled to do so, following earlier rulings which were finally adhered to in 2014. However, alongside the flag a plaque was then placed explaining to anyone who reads it that the presence of the red and yellow emblem is “a symbol imposed under the threat of sanction”, and despite objections the Supreme Court has ruled that regarding this plaque there is no case to be heard. 

Barcelona squatter protests calm down

Five people were arrested on Saturday after they re-occupied the “Expropriated Bank” in the Barcelona district of Gràcia from which they had been evicted on 23rd May, sparking a series of violent protests in the streets of this part of the capital of Catalunya. 

Some of those who managed to cut their way through the security doors installed at the former bank branch reportedly chained themselves to blocks of concrete in an attempt to avoid being thrown out, and as a result it took four hours for the Mossos d’Esquadra (the regional police force) to cut them free so that they could be removed. This followed the announcement on social network sites by the squatters that they had managed to gain entry, a piece of news which led to numerous of their supporters gathering outside on the street where a mood of “tense calm” accompanied the events of the day. 

Motoring news

The two drivers of a coach which was travelling from Madrid to Algeciras on Sunday were both killed when the vehicle collided with a lorry which had broken down on the A-4 motorway and was parked on the hard shoulder in the municipality of Montoro, in the province of Córdoba. The 49 injured passengers were 31 Moroccans, 16 Spaniards, one Colombian and one USA national.

Last week ended with seventeen people being injured on Friday, some severely, when one of the cars taking part in the Rally of Cantabria careered off the course and ploughed into spectators in the village of San Martín de Villafufre.

Meanwhile in Formentera, the south-easternmost of the Balearic Isles, the island’s government has launched an initiative to encourage the use of electric-powered vehicles, providing incentives to those who install re-charging points and imposing restrictions on exhaust contamination, with the long-term aim of entirely eradicating petrol and diesel engines from the island. 

One of the first steps in this direction was taken on Wednesday, when the island’s government signed a deal with Citroën by which six electric e-Mehari cars will be gifted to the government and to hotels on the island. These vehicles will form part of a pilot project which as of next year will be stepped up a gear, after more re-charging points have been set up on Formentera. 

More environmental and agricultural news

After three weeks the fire at the illegal tyre dump in Seseña, in the north of the province of Toledo, has now officially been extinguished, with the firefighters in the municipality of Valdemoro having completed the task of putting out the flames in the northern part of the site which straddles the boundary between Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha.

According to a press release from the regional government of Madrid, the priority is now to proceed with the immediate removal of the residues caused by the blaze, which started on 13th May and has resulted in considerable disruption for the residents of Seseña, where some of the schools have been closed for weeks.

In some parts of Spain the resurgence of the wild wolf population over recent years has become a source of some concern, but elsewhere efforts are still ongoing to ensure that the species survives in the wild and the birth of three cubs last Friday at the Centro del Lobo Ibérico de Castilla y León in Robledo, in the province of Zamora, brought no little satisfaction to the staff there. The centre is located in the north-west of the province, close to the frontier with Portugal and the boundary with the region of Galicia.

Not far away in the province of Salamanca a cattle farm has managed to produce the first crossed herd between the Aberdeen Angus and Morucha breeds of livestock, aiming to improve both the quality and the quantity of beef produced. Similar schemes have already met with limited success in Ávila, with the introduction of Angus genes increasing meat yield, and the only potential problem so far identified is that the cross-breeds do not have horns and are therefore more vulnerable to attack from other animals in the wild. 

An entrepreneur and lepidopterist in the Basque Country province of Álava is setting up what is believed to be only the second butterfly farm in Europe, creating a space of 6,000 square metres in which species which are native to Spain will share their semi-freedom with others which are at risk of extinction. 

In the region of Madrid, a large fire which broke out on Sunday afternoon in Alcalá de Henares, in the region of Madrid, resulted in the destruction of numerous industrial premises but fortunately ended without any injuries being reported.

As for the issue of noise pollution, the Town Hall of Madrid has announced that the organizations taking part in the closing ceremony of last year’s LGTB Pride event in the Spanish capital are to be fined 12,400 euros, after the maximum noise levels established by local byelaws were found to have been exceeded. In general terms the current council in Madrid is seen as being an upholder of the rights of the groups concerned, but the fine was confirmed this week.
 

Crime and punishment

Officers of the Guardia Civil have discovered almost 50 kilograms of marijuana hidden behind the false ceiling of an ambulance bearing French registration plates in the Madrid municipality of Soto del Real, and have arrested both the driver of the vehicle and a man who worked on the land on where it had been parked.

In Granada, meanwhile, 24-year-old Alejandro Fernández presented himself at the Granada prison of Albolote on Tuesday to begin serving the five-year prison sentence to which he was sentenced after being found guilty of using a cloned credit card six years ago, when he was 18. The fraud he committed amounted to no more than 79.20€.

His pleas for a review of the sentence and even an effort to gain a pardon from the national government have fallen on deaf ears, and unsurprisingly this case has received a good deal of attention in the national press, most of the attention focusing on what appears to many to be a disproportionate punishment for a relatively trivial offence.

Immigration

The start of summer traditionally coincides with an increase in the numbers of would-be illegal immigrants making their way towards Spanish territory across the Mediterranean to Andalucía and the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, and last Sunday a total of 90 sub-Saharans were picked up by maritime rescue services while attempting to complete such perilous voyages. 

At the same time, evidence came to light during the week that the controversial practice of returning would-be illegal immigrants to Morocco without observing the relevant administrative and legal protocols is still being carried out by officers of the Guardia Civil in the north African enclave of Ceuta.

El Faro de Ceuta has released footage which shows at least four people being summarily returned to the Moroccan side of the border fence last Saturday, despite the UN having issued a reminder to Spain last week that this procedure is not legal. 

Sports stars in the spotlight

Following last week’s highly publicized court appearance in Barcelona by football superstar Leo Messi, on Tuesday it was the turn of his FC Barcelona colleague Neymar to face press speculation concerning a possible trial. Neymar da Silva is required by the public prosecution service to answer questions related to alleged fraudulent practices surrounding his signing by Barcelona in 2013.

Meanwhile, Jorge Fernández Díaz, the acting Minister of the Interior in the government, announced on Tuesday that the Spanish police are collaborating with the French authorities in the security operation surrounding the Euro 2016 football tournament which begins this coming weekend. Spain are first in action on Monday against the Czech Republic, and Spanish fans will be policed by officers of the Policía Nacional.

After witnessing the shameful violence between English and Russian fans in France this weekend it's to be hoped that Spanish fans will be more interested in football than fighting.

The Nóos Case trial

The high-profile witnesses and the accused have already given evidence in the Nóos Case corruption trial in Palma de Mallorca, where the King’s sister Princess Cristina and her husband Iñaki Urdangarín are among those facing charges, and this week it was the turn of some of the tax collection officials whose information led to the charges being pressed in the first place.

Attention on Tuesday was focused on whether or not their investigations were subtly altered at any stage in such a way as to exonerate the Princess from any blame, an allegation which was strongly denied, and on Friday Cristina was back in court to hear confirmation that the charges against her are not to be dropped.

The amount of attention being paid in the Spanish media to the trial has waned in recent weeks as the witnesses have become less glamorous, but interest is certain to grow as the verdict nears.

Cantabria adopts British-style school year

In Cantabria the regional government has taken the proverbial bull by the horns and re-organized the academic year in a move which will mean schoolchildren adapting to terms and holidays similar to those which are the norm in more northerly countries such as France, Germany and the UK.

As things stand in Spain at the moment, most schoolchildren have no classes between mid-June and mid-September, the long summer holidays mean that other holidays during the year are generally short and infrequent, apart from a two-week break between Christmas and Three Kings Day on 6th January.

It may be because Cantabria is one of the cooler regions of Spain, but it has been decided in the regional capital of Santander that the time has come to change this. Under the new arrangement, which is designed to make terms shorter but more numerous and more productive, students will have a week of holidays every couple of months, and the school year will begin at the start of September and end in late June. There will still be a total of 175 days of classes during the year at all levels of education, from infant schools to non-compulsory secondary education.

The move has met with support from all of the trades unions which represent teachers in Cantabria and were consulted, the consensus being that it will benefit pupils and teachers alike, but Ceapa, the organization representing parents’ associations, rejects it on the grounds that they were not consulted.

Summer begins

As temperatures in parts of Andalucía rose to 40 degrees during the week, work began on Wednesday in Sevilla to combat the summer heat by installing awnings over streets in the old city centre, a procedure which has become habitual in recent years. The current heatwave is forecast to last until the middle of next week.

Obama to visit Pamplona bull runs?

It is not known how up to date US President Barack Obama is on the growing opposition to bull-related fiestas in Spain, but it has emerged from a press conference given by White House spokesman Josh Earnest that the possibility of him paying a visit the bull runs in Pamplona cannot be ruled out.

Mr Obama will become the first American President to visit Spain since George W. Bush in 2001 between 9th and 11th July this year, and when asked whether he planned to visit the “Sanfermines” Mr Earnest replied “I suspect that he could possibly be interested in that”. Should he go to Pamplona, of course, the next question is whether Barack Obama will actually join in the bull run itself, but his security guards may question the wisdom of such an adventurous step!

Spanish property news

The latest residential property sales figures which were published on Thursday by Spain’s central statistics unit appear to quell any lingering doubts that the country’s uncertain political situation could be having any negative effect on the real estate market, with the monthly total of 35,199 sales in April representing a 29% increase on the same month last year.

This is the single highest monthly figure in over five years, apart from a brief burst of activity which was reflected in the totals for January and February of 2013, and equally encouraging is that the year-to-date sales figure for the first four months of 2016 now stands at 134,312, which is 13.8% higher than at the same point last year.

The April figures were higher than last year in all 17 of Spain’s regions, the most notable increases being those reported in the Balearics (61.7%), Galicia, (51.6%), the Comunidad Valenciana (46.6%) and the Region of Murcia (44.2%)

At the same time, price data which showed not only that the market is growing in volume but also that the value of property is on the up, having risen by 6.3% in the twelve months ending on 31st March 2016. This year-on-year increase is the eighth in a row after a downward trend which lasted six years from early 2008, and the most significant in the last eight and a half years.

Meanwhile, the latest residential property price survey conducted in May by leading valuation firm Tinsa shows that in Spain as a whole the average market value per square metre rose by 1.3% over the previous twelve months, although the accumulated rise in the first five months of 2016 was slightly higher at 1.5%. The best performing markets were those of the Balearic and Canary Islands and Spain’s regional capitals and other large cities, where prices this May are reported to have been 3.5% higher than a year ago.

Tinsa also published their latest “market snapshot”, which underlines numerous reasons to expect continuing upward movements in the value of homes in Spain.

Elsewhere, as inroads are made into the excess supply of unsold residential properties which remained when the market collapsed in late 2007 and 2008, in some areas of Spain the need for new housing is such that off-plan buying is at last making a comeback in order to meet increased demand. 

In parts of Madrid, Barcelona and the Costa del Sol the existing stock of unsold completed properties is now “practically non-existent”, and not only does this lead to an increase in market price, it also brings about a reactivation of the construction activity which ground to a halt in 2008. As a result last year the number of building licences granted for new residential properties shot up (from a very low level, admittedly) by 42.5% and this year, judging by the licence statistics, the recovery has continued.

An example of this can be seen in the Costa Blanca, where in Orihuela Costa on Tuesday the Town Hall granted licences for the building of 270 more homes. Among the 270 new properties planned are 245 on a development in the Las Filipinas area in a project which was originally approved as long ago as 2003, demonstrating that after the prolonged slump in the real estate sector there is once more sufficient demand to make such a development viable.

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