ARCHIVED - Murcia and Spanish news round-up, week ending 3rd June 2016

Murcia beaches ready for summer, new minister takes responsibility for Corvera airport

New minister takes over responsibility for Corvera airport

This week saw the official appointment on 1^st June of Pedro Rivera Barrachina as the man who will take over from Francisco Bernabé as minister for Development and Infrastructures in the regional government of Murcia, and he comes into offive with a number of high-profile projects in the pending tray on his desk.

First and foremost among these is the finalization of the terms of the management contract at the unopened Corvera airport, and the day after he took office Sr Rivera visited the unopened Region of Murcia International Airport to see at first hand the facilities which undoubtedly constitute his most pressing challenge. After his visit he praised the quality, capacity, size and design of the terminal and the other facilities, and also anticipated, like his predecessors in the post, the boost it will bring to the regional economy when it eventually opens, particularly in terms of international tourism.

As yet there is still no news regarding the date on which the new management contract at Corvera will be put out to tender. However, the latest regional government press release on the subject reiterates that the terms of the tender process will be finalized “soon”. 

Sr Rivera will also be overseeing the attempts to speed up the arrival of the AVE rail services to Murcia and Cartagena, and other important projects which are currently still up in the air include the regeneration of the contaminated bay of Portmán and the project for a macro- container port in El Gorguel, which is currently dependent on approval being given by the EU.  

Tourism

Meanwhile, the tourist boom hoped for by Pedro Rivera is already being achieved to a certain extent by other initiatives, and according to data released on Monday the number of foreign visitors to Murcia in April rose by 42.1% in comparison to 2015 to reach 118,210. This is a mere 1.9% of the national total for the whole of Spain, but even so it represents a considerable improvement, and it also means that Murcia was the seventh most popular destination among Spain’s 17 regions during the month, behind Catalunya, the Canary Islands, Andalucía, the Balearics, the Comunidad Valenciana and Madrid.

Equally encouraging are the year-to-date figures, which show that after four months of 2016 the cumulative total stood at 258,813 following an increase of 32.6%.

It has become almost a given in Murcia that the most important source of foreign tourism is the UK market, and again this is the case in the latest data, with British visitors accounting for 38.9% of the overall total. However, this is a smaller share than in the past, due not to a decrease in the number of UK nationals coming to the Costa Cálida but to increased interest from other markets such as France and Germany. Efforts are also being made to attract visitors from other countries, and in the last week alone 25 representatives of Hungarian travel agencies took part in a familiarization trip organized in collaboration with central European tour operator Budavar tours, kayaking journalists from Denmark completed a 107-kilometre trip along the coast and the campaign to attract more Scandinavian golfers continued to produce results.

In Caravaca de la Cruz preparations continue for the Holy Jubilee year in 2017, when thousands of pilgrims are expected to follow the Camino de Levante route from Orihuela to the north-west of Murcia, and in the municipality of Murcia work is already under way to equip the route with the necessary signposting, which includes not only arrows pointing pilgrims towards Caravaca but also information panels, distance markers and milestones. A tasty prelude to the 2017 celebration was held this week, when 400 infants’ school pupils in Caravaca de la Cruz were invited by a local master chocolatier to help him dispose of his chocolate replica of the Holy Cross of Caravaca: the youngsters had little trouble in providing a good home for the chocolate which has been on display for the last three months!

Economic news

At the end of May the number of people registered as unemployed in Murcia was 118,888, having fallen by 3.01% during the month (slightly more than the national improvement of 2.99%) and by 8.98% over the last year: this makes it one of the regions where the jobless total has fallen more sharply than the 7.68% in the country as a whole.

The regional president comes under fire

The Spanish regional media is full of coverage this week about an investigation relating to the "Caso Púnica", a nationwide case relating to alleged irregularities in the contracting of services within public administrations, and although the main bulk of the allegations concern public administrations in Madrid and Valencia, Murcia has been caught up in them.

This week Pedro Antonio Sánchez, the president of the regional government in Murcia, suddenly found himself embroiled in the case after a Guardia Civil report which was submitted to National Court Judge Eloy Velasco recommended that he should be requested to answer questions. The same report also concludes that there are sufficient grounds for Pilar Barreiro, the former Mayoress of Cartagena, to be investigated.

Following the breaking of the news regarding the Guardia Civil’s report there has been speculation in the national and regional press regarding the tenability of Pedro Antonio Sánchez’s position as head of the government of the Region of Murcia. That he is able to govern with a minority (the PP occupy 22 of the 45 seats in the regional parliament) is due to an agreement with the Ciudadanos party, but the terms of this agreement include the condition that anyone who is under judicial investigation must relinquish his or her post. 

The response from the regional government and Sr Sánchez has been one of calm and firm denial, and Francisco Bernabé, until recently the minister for Development and Infrastructures in the Region of Murcia and now a PP candidate for the national parliamentary election on 26^th June has stated that the allegations against Sr Sánchez are no more substantial than smoke, Sr Bernabé also suggested that the leaking of the confidential Guardia Civil report could have been timed to coincide with pre-election campaigning.

Sixteen times Pedro Antonio Sánchez has been accused of wrongdoings, he added, and sixteen times the judges have declared him to be not guilty, but the "trial by media" looks set to continue.

Agriculture and the environment

Seldom have the topics of agriculture and the environment been more closely intertwined than in the conflict over the run-off of nitrates and other harmful substances along the Rambla del Albujón and into the Mar Menor which has developed into a major issue in the Region of Murcia over the course of the last week.

In response to concerns over the sustainability of the fragile ecosystem in the Mar Menor the regional government decided last week to seal off the waste water pipes from small water treatment plants in the Campo de Cartagena.

This followed a visit by members of the regional parliament to the Mar Menor last Friday, but the decision caused anger among farmers. The farmers argue, understandably, that this deprives them of the water they need for their summer crops, and while accepting the need to salvage the marine environment of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon they are at the same time refusing to allow the pipes to be sealed until an alternative water supply is guaranteed.

Officials from the Condeferación Hidrográfica del Segura (CHS) have been prevented by farmers from sealing off the pipes on more than one occasion already.

Nonetheless, the regional government now hopes that the deadlock can be broken early next week following an urgent meeting with the Secretary of State for the Environment in Madrid on Thursday, during which a commitment was made to present a revised plan of action next Tuesday. Most probably this plan will include the construction of a pipeline running from the Campo de Cartagena to the Mediterranean in San Pedro del Pinatar, and given the urgency of maintaining both the Mar Menor and the crops in the fields of the hinterland to its west it is hoped that it will be acceptable to all parties.

It has to be stressed that the problems does not affect the whole of the Mar Menor.

Another environmental issue which is of great concern to many is that of “pooping pooches”, and in Cartagena on Tuesday representatives of various council departments, including those from the legal and sanitation divisions of the local council, met to discuss a new scheme which facilitates the identification of an animal through the DNA in its faeces.

This may sound like an extreme measure, but councils across the Murcia Region have been waging war on doggie doings for some considerable time. In spite of intense campaigns advising dog owners of the illegality and anti-social aspects of leaving dog excrement on the pavements, the sight of dog poo drying in the sun is still a frequent occurrence.

The options and practicalities of creating a register of dog DNA are being carefully examined, and the council is working with a business experienced in implementing similar systems in other areas which are achieving significant success.

The start of summer

Factor 30 sun protection is rapidly becoming an essential as the first day of June brought with it glorious sunshine and a hint of the summer to come. Temperatures popped over the 30 degree mark in the centre of the region just after lunch, and the prize for hottest municipality of the day went to Molina de Segura at 30.8 degrees, with Archena at 30.7 and Murcia city just behind at 30.4.  

Of course the beaches of the Costa Cálida are now beginning to fill up, and the Town Hall of San Javier is among those which have has officially inaugurated the 2016 beach vigilance and lifeguard program, opening four lifeguard points as of 1st June.

Of course, though, the summer brings problems as well, not least among them the annual mosquito invasion. The Town Hall of Murcia has reported that the reconnaissance flight carried out by a helicopter last week identified over 80 potential tiger mosquito breeding grounds in the municipality, and efforts are now being made to contact the owners of the land on which they are located to request their collaboration in this summer’s anti-mosquito campaign.

A similar note of warning was sounded by the outbreak of a wild fire on Monday near a pine grove in Albudeite, one of the smallest municipalities in the Region of Murcia, affecting 1.5 hectares of farmland and half a hectare of wooded ground, and unfortunately the strong winds and choppy waves on the Mediterranean caused a 60-year-old man to drown off the Playa de Las Palmeras in La Azohía on Sunday.

As the wild fire season approaches, it has been announced that the contract for extending and enlarging the Alhama-Totana fire station has been awarded, and within 18 months the firefighters who cover five municipalities from this base will have larger headquarters at their disposal.

Crime

Unfortunately there are frequent cases in the Region of Murcia of rural and agricultural theft, and while in most cases these involve the disappearance of farm machinery or relatively small amounts of produce a man has recently been arrested for falsely claiming to own a whole lemon orchard in Molina de Segura.

The 45-year-old Italian man attempted to sell 80,000 kilograms of lemons as if they were his own, taking advantage of the fact that the market price of lemons is currently 140% higher than a year ago to offer them at 70,000 euros, around 30 per cent below market value.

In Cieza, meanwhile, security cameras are to be installed to protect some of the many fruit orchards in the municipality, and the Guardia Civil has recovered 100 metres of copper cable which had been stolen from the railway station, arresting two people in the process. The theft occurred in February of this year, and caused signal failures which resulted in long delays on the line between Murcia and Madrid.

Yecla is also installing security cameras to deter vandalism, while in Archena the Corpus Christi celebrations ended badly when a drunk driver crashed into another vehicle, injuring three people. The driver was also under the influence of drugs.  

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Murcia property news

The gradual improvement in the health of the residential property market in the Region of Murcia continues to mean good news for the construction sector of the economy, as higher demand for homes in the Costa Cálida eats into existing stock and creates the need for new flats and houses to be built.

This is reflected in the latest first-quarter figures published by the Ministry of Development, which show that in Murcia the number of residential properties for which building licences were granted between January and March 2016 reached 298. This is 8% higher than in the first quarter of 2015, and at the same time the 12-month running total has risen over the last year by 9.4% to 1,084, well short of the increase seen in the country as a whole, but nevertheless encouraging.

However, a word of caution: the mortgage foreclosure statistics for the first quarter of 2016 (see below) show that the rate of foreclosures in Murcia is higher than in any other region of Spain. The next highest rates are in Andalucía and the Comunidad Valenciana, corresponding no doubt to the fact that there was more speculative buying on the Mediterranean coast during the boom years of 2005 to 2008 than in other parts of the country.

Spanish news round-up

Electioneering warms up prior to the general election this month

The debate over the debate is over, and now the four main presidential candidates in Spain at the general election on 26th June can concentrate instead on preparing themselves for the debate itself.

The debate in question is the eagerly awaited coming together of the four men in a televised event, the date of which has now been set for 13th June. Organizing the event, which promises to be the focal point of the electoral campaign, is a consortium of all three of Spain’s main television companies, namely RTVE, Mediaset and A3Media.

This time round acting President Mariano Rajoy of the PP party will take part in person rather than delegating, having agreed to join Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE, Pablo Iglesias of Podemos and Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos. Sr Rajoy entered the campaigning on Monday morning with what appeared to be a cryptic puzzle on his official Twitter account: “after the last few months, this is how I see the political situation”, read his tweet, accompanied by a horizontal red line on a white background. 

Any suspicion that the President may have been suffering after a stressful weekend was soon dispersed as other leading lights in the PP party began to tweet identical messages, and during the day it emerged that the party aims to get rid of the “red lines” (or inflexible policies) which have led to there being no inter-party governing pact since the last election on 20th December.

Economic news

The latest figures published on Thursday by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security show that at the end of May the number of people registered as unemployed in Spain was 3,891,403, following the most significant decrease in the jobless total ever recorded during the fifth month of the year. At the same time it means that for the first time since August 2010 the overall total has fallen below 4 million.

Mariano Rajoy and the PP have made the most of the opportunity to vindicate their economic policies and labour reforms, but there is also ammunition contained in Thursday’s data for the opposition to point out that not all is well. One of the main criticisms highlighted by critics of the government, for example, is that only 52.8% of those who are out of work receive any kind of social security benefit, the rest of them either not qualifying for aid or having exhausted their right to receive it.

Elsewhere, the provisional data for May showed that the retail price index was 1 per cent lower than in May 2015, the fifth consecutive month of negative inflation in Spain, while the number of new motor vehicles purchased and registered continues to rise steadily, following the sharp fall which accompanied the start of the economic crisis in 2008.

In the first five months of 2016 the total has reached 499,444, which is 12.5% higher than in the equivalent period last year, and according to the federations representing manufacturers and concessionaires, the figures are being boosted by the sharp increase this year in the number of tourists visiting Spain from abroad. This means that car hire companies are renewing and expanding their fleets in the expectation of a busy and profitable summer, and as a result sales to these firms shot up in May to 34,098, an increase of 37.7%.

At the same time it appears that major car manufacturers are prepared to put any doubts about the political situation aside and back Spanish production plants. On Thursday of this week it was reported that Volkswagen will be producing a second model at its factory in Landaben, in the region of Navarra. It is expected that the expansion of operations in Landaben will directly create between 300 and 500 new jobs at the factory.

Finally, one example of a successful campaign to cut spending and eliminate deficit comes from Spain’s royal family. For the first time ever the Spanish Royal Household has published its fully audited accounts, showing that of the 7.7-million-euro budget assigned to the family in 2015 exactly 177,130 euros remained unspent.

British visitors boost the tourism sector

Driven by a significant increase in the number of people coming to Spain from the UK, the number of visitors from abroad during the month of April reached almost 6.1 million, 11.3% more than in 2015. Almost one in four of those visitors were UK nationals, the figure having climbed by 18.3% to just over 1.4 million, while the numbers of people visiting from France and Germany also rose but less significantly.

The importance of British visitors to the main tourist destinations is also reflected by the fact that in Andalucía, the Canaries and the Comunidad Valenciana the UK was the main supplier of foreign visitors by a considerable distance, and the British were the second most numerous group in the Balearics and Catalunya (behind Germany and France respectively).

Catalan separatism

Carles Puigdemont, the president of the regional government of Catalunya, reiterated last Friday that he has no intention of delaying the process of separation from the rest of Spain which his administration has set in motion, and extended an invitation to whoever forms the new government of Spain after the general election on 26th June to hold talks on the issue.

“We are not going to sit waiting for ever with our arms crossed”, Sr Puigdemont warned at a conference organized by Nueva Economía Foro in Madrid.

The whole issue of Catalan independence is still simmering and occasionally comes to the boil, as was illustrated on Sunday by the participation of thousands in a march to protest against the national government’s attempts to repeal recent laws passed by the regional government in Barcelona.

Problems in Barcelona

A year after she took office as Mayoress of Barcelona, Ada Colau faced a week of disruption in the city as the violent and noisy protests of evicted squatters continues in the Gràcia district and workers on the metro system begin a week of partial strikes.

Some calm has now been restored in Grácia, where it has come to light that the current council led by Sra Colau even considered purchasing the property in order to allow the “okupas” back in. This option has now been discarded on account of the high asking price (reported to be in the region of half a million euros), but nonetheless it has led to accusations that the Mayoress is prepared to “buy” law and order, effectively being held to ransom by the protesters.

At the same time, there are allegations that the small number of arrests in relation to the incidents of the last week is a direct consequence of instructions issued by Ada Colau to detain as few people as possible, thus avoiding further provocation of the angry squatters.

Meanwhile, commuters and visitors in Barcelona faced disruption on the metro network in the city with four days of strikes, and long queues formed at metro stations as they did three months ago during the World Mobile Congress.

Gibraltar considers Spanish sovereignty

Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar, has stated in a television interview that if the UK votes on 23^rd June to leave the EU the British Overseas Territory could accept a Spanish co-sovereignty proposal in order to remain part of the European Union.

Mr Picardo asserts that the Spanish offer would ease sovereignty fears among residents and businesses in Gibraltar, and he warns that if the UK leaves the EU then the Spanish authorities could close the land border with the Rock.

Seseña tyre fire

The massive fire at the illegal tyre dump in Seseña, which straddles the boundary between the province of Toledo in Castilla-La Mancha and the region of Madrid, has now been declared extinguished by firefighters in the southern end of the premises.

However, the nature of Spain’s regional divisions is such that different fire brigades are required to act in different Autonomous Communities, and at the northern end of the dump, which is in the Madrid municipality of Valdemoro, the blaze is still smouldering on.

During the intervening period the air has been filled with foul-smelling and potentially harmful smoke on numerous occasions, depending on the prevailing breeze. Some schoolchildren are still waiting to return to their classrooms: it had been hoped that the schools would re-open on 1st June, but at the El Quiñón primary school this has now been put back to next Monday.

It now falls to the authorities in Madrid to complete the job at the northern end of the dump, which contains fewer tyres, a task which has been delayed by the Guardia Civil cordoning off a large area to investigate the causes of the fire until 27th May. 

Refugees and immigrants

On Monday and Wednesday groups of 45 and 19 refugees arrived in Spain from Greece, bringing the total up to 106 in eight days after a long wait for the program to meet the EU’s quota for this country to get under way.

Those who arrived on Monday were 25 Syrians, 19 Iraqi nationals and one individual from the Central African Republic, while the 19 who flew into Madrid-Barajas airport on Wednesday were all Syrians and Iraqis. It is planned that the figure will rise to 586 by the end of June

In the north African enclave of Ceuta, meanwhile, two would-be illegal immigrants, one from Gambia and the other from Guinea, have been arrested after the small boat of which they were in charge capsized while carrying another ten sub-Saharans on their way towards Ceuta.

When the boat was spotted on its way towards Ceuta the Guardia Civil hurried to the scene and arrived just in time to see it turn over, at which point an emergency rescue operation succeeded in saving the lives of all twelve people on board.

Crime and emergencies

Three days of official mourning were declared by the Town Hall of Jaén following a house fire on Saturday which ended with the deaths of five members of one family, with the cause reported to have been an attempt to rekindle a fire using gasoline.

The five dead are a four-year-old boy, his four-month-old sister, who was initially taken to intensive care but passed away on Sunday, their father and two of their grandparents. Incredibly, this is not the first time that this house has been in the national headlines: on 12th October a young schoolteacher named Rocío Estepa, another resident of the La Magdalena district, was murdered there by her partner.

In Sevilla the body of a woman who had been strangled was found inside a car which was parked at the airport on Thursday morning, and it has since transpired that she had become another victim of gender violence after missing a flight to Italy.

On the drugs front, meanwhile, the Guardia Civil raided a huge marijuana plantation which had been set up in a modern apartment block in Vinaròs in the north of the province of Castellón (Comunidad Valenciana), where 3,237 plants occupied four apartments which had been connected by knocking doorways through dividing walls, and in Alicante 13 people have been arrested on charges of stealing top-of-the-range motorbikes with a view to selling them to customers in China, Algeria and Morocco, in an operation which also concluded with the recovery of sixteen stolen bikes.

Motoring news

So far 2016 has not been a good year on the roads of Spain, with the number of crash victims having risen in each of the first four months, and given the nature of some of the incidents reported by the police and the Guardia Civil it is hard to see how danger can be eliminated from the roads of this country.

This week a brother and sister from Cúllar, both aged 77, were both killed in a road accident on Tuesday after they drove for 20 kilometres on the wrong side of the motorway in Granada before eventually colliding head-on with another vehicle, also killing the driver, a 52-year-old man from Albolote.

Another driver who was detained, fortunately before she could cause any serious accidents, was a woman who, to the incredulity of the police officers who spotted her, was seen driving while breastfeeding her 2-year-old daughter at the same time. While they were attempting to stop her she carried out a prohibited u-turn, and when eventually she was taken in for questioning it emerged that her driver’s licence had expired and was therefore not valid.

At a time when various of the new toll motorways in Spain are in serious danger of being closed due to the lack of traffic using them and the inability of the government to nationalize them, the statistics show that at last the number of drivers opting to use the roads concerned appears to be rising significantly. In March, doubtless boosted by Easter falling early this year, the average number of vehicles using all the toll motorways in Spain rose to 17,717 per day, an increase of 16.7%, while comparable increases were also observed in the whole of the first quarter.

Sport

The trial began in the courts of Barcelona on Tuesday of Leo Messi, who is accused along with his father, Jorge Horacio Messi, of three tax evasion offences relating to the footballer’s image rights. 

Messi was not required to testify until Thursday, when he answered only ten questions and denied any knowledge of how tax havens work and what his involvement in them might be, but he is reported to have been more visibly nervous than at any point in his footballing career.

Historical Memory Law

Madrid lawyer Eduardo Ranz is continuing his crusade to enforce the implementation of Spain’s Historical Memory Law, and has now presented a complaint against the Town Hall of Tortosa (in Tarragona) in relation to the monument which stands in the middle of the River Ebro, and which was built to commemorate Franco’s victory in the Battle of the Ebro in 1938.

The Madrid lawyer argues that the local council has not obeyed the Historical Memory Law in allowing the monument, the largest of its kind in the region of Catalunya, to remain in place, although a local referendum has been held in which 68.36% of those who voted supported the idea of “reinterpreting” it rather than removing it and placing it in a museum.

Bullfighting

While former King Juan Carlos I continues to enjoy his visits to the bullring of Las Ventas in Madrid, where he attended a corrida with his daughter Elena and his grandson Froilan this week, in many parts of the country the tide of public opinion continues to turn against this most Spanish of traditions.

This was made manifest once again in the province of Valencia on Wednesday, when the inhabitants of Xàtiva voted by a narrow margin to eliminate bull-related events from the local fiestas this year. The result of the vote was almost even, but in the end by a margin of just 79 the anti-bullfighting faction won the day.

Spanish property news

Optimism continues to abound among property market professionals in Spain, with one of the latest illustrations of the positive expectations being the publication of a report which forecasts that sales figures will rise by 10% and prices will go up by 3.8% during 2016.

The report was compiled by property portal Servihabitat, and estimates an annual sales total this year of 440,000, although the forecast price increase has been revised downwards from a previous estimate of 6.2%.For the construction sector in Spain the last eight years have been little short of disastrous, with the over-supply of homes following the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007 and 2008 leading to there being practically no demand for new properties. However, the latest figures published by the Ministry of Development report year-on-year growth of 57% in the number of building licences granted during the first quarter of 2016, the first-quarter figure of 16,782 being the highest since 2011.

More good news regards mortgage foreclosures, with official statistics published on Thursday showing that fewer people are finding themselves unable to continue meeting their repayment schedules. During the first quarter of 2016 there were 7,854 foreclosures involving individual property owners (rather than corporate owners), 30.9% fewer than in the same period last year.

Unsurprisingly it is the mortgages from those boom years, when prices were artificially inflated, which account for most of the foreclosures which were registered between January and March this year. Between them, loans constituted in 2006, 2007 and 2008 amount to 47.4% of the total, whereas those from the last three years account for only 6.6%.

It has to be pointed out that the falling number of foreclosures is not due only to the greater ability of borrowers to meet their repayment schedules: the banks have also played their part, showing more willingness to re-negotiate terms rather than re-possessing properties and expanding their real estate portfolios.

More mortgage news: the Banco de España has confirmed that the Euribor interest rate, on which the annual reviews of most Spanish mortgage repayment schedules are based, continued to fall in May, ending the month at -0.015% and recording a monthly average of 0.013%, a new record low. Many analysts feel that the Euribor is now close to bottoming out, and are warning that in the medium term a significant increase is likely: this could make it an ideal time to consider a fixed rate mortgage, which would mean higher initial repayments but at the same time provides the peace of mind of knowing exactly what the repayment schedule will be over the full term of the loan.

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