ARCHIVED - Murcian and Spanish news round-up week ending 26th February 2016

Tourism booms, Sterling wobbles as Brexit debate begins and art goes bananas

Now that Carnival is well and truly over, the final act having been completed with the Águilas Drag Queen Gala last weekend, it’s time for the Region of Murcia to look forward to the end of winter and the arrival of spring, and despite the forecast of lower temperatures for this weekend the signs are that both the tourist industry and the population as a whole are already in the mood for the next round of fiestas around Easter and an influx of visitors to the Region.

Murcia's tourist industry prepares for more visitors

An early indication that more tourists can be expected this year in Murcia is that during the Águilas Carnival the number of enquiries made at the tourist office was over 50% higher than in 2015, with more than a third of them coming from non-Spanish visitors, and according to the regional government as many as 3,000 new jobs will be created in Murcia’s tourist sector this year. 

Efforts are continuous to attract as many different kinds of visitor as possible. Over the last few days special campaigns have targeted cyclists in the Netherlands and senior tourists from the Czech Republic, where the experience of the last four years suggests that the mud baths of the Mar Menor are a major attraction: this led to the production of a poster at a Prague tourism fair which will surprise many whose idea of fun does not include being coated in black mud, therapeutic though it may be, but apparently for Czech visitors of a certain age that’s how to promote the Costa Cálida!

Further inland, religious tourism in Caravaca de la Cruz is sure to be boosted by the arrival in the city of a reliquary containing some of the blood of Pope Saint John Paul, who awarded the Holy Jubilee to Caravaca in 1998. Caravaca is one of only five cities in the world to have been awarded a perpetual Holy Jubilee (alongside Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Santo Toribio de Liébana), and is currently preparing for the next such event in 2017, but this week the focus was on the arrival of the reliquary, which was paraded through the streets of Caravaca from the Basílica to the church of El Salvador, where it is now housed in a niche in the choir. 

Environmental and nature news 

Meanwhile, in and around the Mar Menor the initiatives to improve the facilities and infrastructures of Murcia’s main summer tourist destination continue, and this week it has been announced that seven new daily mooring points are to be created in order to relieve the pressure on the lagoon’s marinas. At the same time the Town Hall of Cartagena is pushing for the restoration of the monastery of San Ginés de la Jara, which ought to be a major monument just inland from the coast of the Mar Menor but instead is a neglected semi-ruin standing alongside the dual carriageway which leads to La Manga. 

As part of the project to boost the Mar Menor the dredging of the marina in Mar de Cristal goes on, although this is not to the liking of environmental activists, while in Lo Pagán and San Pedro del Pinatar the construction of new stormwater tanks is progressing well. This will please not only local residents who are desperate for the problem of flooding to be reduced but also the environmentalists, as the tanks will contribute to reducing the amount of material washed by runoff water into the inland sea. 

Naturalists were also in the news this week for a rather different reason: the Asociación de Naturalistas del Sureste, better known as ANSE, have unveiled a crowdfunding campaign in an attempt to finance the purchase of the Danish sailing boat which they have been using and maintaining since 1997. The “Else”, a two-masted schooner, came into the possession of the Spanish authorities in September 1996, when it was towed into the port of Cartagena after being found adrift of the coast of Murcia, and the Guardia Civil found 1,500 kilos of hashish in the hold. 

Since then it has been run and maintained by ANSE, but now at long last court proceedings have been concluded and the association needs 13,000 euros to purchase the Else: this is but a fraction of the 130,000 euros which have been spent on it over the last eight years, during which time those on board have monitored the populations of various species in the western Mediterranean including birds, turtles and marine mammals.

The world of nature made a short but spectacular appearance in the news in the early hours of Tuesday morning when a dazzling fireball crossed the sky before dipping below the horizon, while less dramatic were the efforts made in Alhama and the Puebla del Soto to preserve two giant trees. One was a ficus which had grown so big as to become a hazard both to itself and to the nearby houses before being transplanted to a park in Alhama, while in the countryside of Puebla del Soto the specimen in question was one of the finest Mediterranean hackberries in Spain, which has been receiving its regular spring pruning and cutting back-

Preparations for Easter

As Easter nears, the Region of Murcia is preparing for the Semana Santa processions, which this year in the centre of Cartagena are to be accompanied by the city’s first balcony decoration competition, while in the city of Murcia, where many of the inhabitants dress in traditional costume and party a week after Easter Sunday, two life-sized models of jovial huertano folk have provided a permanent photo opportunity and a homage to the traditions of the regional countryside. As yet unnamed, the happy couple have already had the privilege of meeting the 27 young women who are competing this year for the prestigious title of Reina de la Huerta for this year’s Semana de Primavera.

Health service news

A few positive stories regarding the regional health service in Murcia have been in the news this week, one of them being that the 2016 flu epidemic appears to be less virulent and contagious than has been the case in recent years. 840 cases were reported last week, but there has not been the overcrowding in public hospitals which many had feared.

In Cartagena, meanwhile, next week sees the number of beds available for surgery patients increased to 33 at the Rosell hospital, which is being partially brought back into service in order to reduce waiting lists for operations, and at the Los Arcos del Mar Menor hospital in the outskirts of San Javier a mental health care unit will open in the near future. At the same time, in nearby San Pedro del Pinatar there are plans to modernize and improve the medical centre of Lo Pagán, where 43 health professionals are currently employed.

Crime

The Santa Lucía hospital in Cartagena was also in the news, but not for any reason related to health care. A woman whose handbag was stolen while she was visiting her husband in the hospital last Saturday was surprised the following day to find the thief in her home, having used the keys in the handbag to gain access and search for more valuables. The handbag theft was a major inconvenience, involving as it did the loss of the victim’s personal documentation and ID card, her mobile phone and her house keys, but as it turned out the fact that her keys were in the bag led to the missing items being recovered: when she returned home on Sunday she found the thief, a 34-year-old woman, in the process of taking jewelry from her bedroom and, with the help of her son and a neighbour, prevented her from leaving the premises while officers of the Policía Nacional arrived and made the arrest.

Others to be rounded up by the long arm of the law this week included five members of a drug dealing group in the city of Lorca, two men who robbed a house in Isla Plana in December, and a young man in Santomera who is accused of no fewer than 43 thefts from motor vehicles in the vicinity of his home. He racked up this impressive total in the short time since being arrested for similar offences only last year. 

News from pre-history

Finally, it’s not often that an event which happened 900 million years ago can be described as news, but that was the case this week regarding the latest discoveries made by researchers in the Cueva de Victoria, a cave in the municipality of Cartagena.

The fossilized remains of the forerunners of human beings and other African primates which have been found by researchers from Catalunya in the cave provide solid evidence to support the theory that Man arrived in Europe around 900,000 years ago by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. At that time the sea level in the Mediterranean is known to have been around 100 metres lower than at present, and if the conclusion drawn by the team from the University of Barcelona is correct then it contradicts the widely held belief that hominids arrived in Spain from the north, crossing the Pyrenees. 

Stop press: four months of severe disruption to traffic in Cartagena start on Wednesday on the A-30 motorway at the entrance to the city: seek alternative routes wherever possible.

The state of limbo in the Spanish government looks set to continue

Negotiations among Spain’s leading political parties have dominated the national news for the last few weeks, and after an eventful week prior to the first presidential investiture debate which starts next Tuesday they seem almost certain to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

It emerged on Tuesday that a pact had been agreed between the PSOE and Ciudadanos, a ground-breaking agreement which was initially greeted in some quarters with a triumphalism that bordered on euphoria, but it has not taken long for hopes of a new government being formed as a result of next week’s presidential investiture debate to be well and truly quashed.

When Pedro Sánchez presents his candidacy in parliament on Tuesday it will presumably be with the support of the 90 representatives of his own PSOE group and the 40 Ciudadanos MPs, but this leaves him a long way short of the figure of 176 which would give him a majority. The hope at the time must have been that at least one of the other two main parties would either support the pact or abstain in the voting next week, but since then both the PP and Podemos have made it clear that they will be voting against Sr Sánchez.

Following the debate on Tuesday and Wednesday there will then be a period of two months within which further attempts to engineer a working majority can be made, and in reality what the main party leaders are doing now is preparing for the negotiations which will follow during March and April. Mariano Rajoy of the PP has informed Sr Rivera that he too is willing to consider an alliance with Ciudadanos, but not until after Pedro Sánchez’s bid to become President fails, while Pablo Iglesias of Podemos is reportedly still open to the possibility of forming an alliance with the PSOE but not while the agreement with Ciudadanos still stands. The situation is, to say the least, complicated. 

Most observers believe the outcome will be another General Election in June, which means that Spain will have lacked a government for six months.

For Sr Rajoy this comes at the end of a week when he was declared “persona non grata” by the Town Hall of Pontevedra, the city he calls home, in protest at the decision to allow a paper factory to continue its operations on the banks of the Ría. The President admitted to being hurt by the decision, and must have wished that his fellow Galicians were as tolerant as the Catalans of Premià de Dalt, who voted not to withdraw the honour of “honorary son” from former regional president Jordi Pujol despite the accusations of misappropriating public funds which he faces. The justification for not taking this step is the principle of assuming Sr Pujol’s innocence until such time as he may be proven guilty.

The political deadlock in Madrid is even beginning to cause concern in the Royal Academy, where there are worries that the lack of leadership is detracting attention from the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quijote. As the UK is embroiled in the Brexit debate there is still time to commemorate the parallel anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, but in Spain the concern is that politicians are currently too busy attempting to form a government to remember the man who is arguably the nation’s most admired writer.

Barcelona in the news for the wrong reasons

The city of Barcelona has been constantly in the news this week for various reasons, some positive and some negative. Most of the positive news has revolved around sport, with FC Barcelona opening up an eight-point gap at the top of football’s La Liga and the official Formula 1 practice sessions at Montmeló providing four days of high-speed action, but elsewhere the city has not been presented in its best light during the week of the high-profile World Mobile Congress.

At the official opening ceremony of the congress King Felipe VI, speaking in Catalan in order to ensure that even the most radical of nationalists captured the full meaning of his words, underlined the importance of “working for the common good”, and while both he and the regional president Carles Puigdemont steered clear of mentioning the independence issue there can be little doubt that those who understood this to be an indirect reference to the topic were not far from the truth.

Sadly, though, the city’s public transport sector workers were in no mood to heed the King’s message, and throughout the week a series of strikes on the Metro, the buses and the rail network have made for commuter misery. Wednesday’s Metro strike was less disruptive than the one which took place on Monday, but even so there were queues outside the entrances to Metro stations as passengers waited in overcrowded conditions inside, and as passengers shied away from the Metro there was also overcrowding on the buses and road traffic ground to a halt in some parts of the city.

To make matters worse, the speed limit on major roads was reduced by the regional government in 40 municipalities in response to the high air pollution levels which were recorded on both Tuesday and Wednesday, due in large part to the Saharan dust particles which have swept over Spain from the south over the last few days. 

The dust cloud also prompted the Town Hall of Barcelona prevent leaf blowers being used by street cleaners, and the authorities in Catalunya recommended that travellers should use public transport in order to reduce the contribution of private motor vehicles to the already high pollution levels. The irony of this will not be lost on the long-suffering commuters of Barcelona, who have found public transport very difficult to use all week.

The city was also in the news when five people were arrested on Wednesday morning in connection with a scam which left 750 elderly people without care and meals, after investigations revealed that once public contracts had been won the policy of the BB Serveis group was to fulfil absolutely none of their obligations. 2,000 staff were not paid and the total amount owed by the fraudsters has been calculated to be over 34.6 million euros.

Gender violence and sexual equality

During the week another gender violence killing was reported in Zaragoza, where a man shot his former partner before turning the murder weapon on himself and committing suicide. This topic is receiving more and more exposure in the media as attempts are made to eliminate gender violence from Spanish society.

Two other cases, both far less shocking than the one in Zaragoza, also touched on the issue this week. One of them was in Málaga, where the management of the Picasso Museum has performed a u-turn in its policy on banning food and drink in the galleries by permitting breastfeeding “as and when it is required” (while noting that most mothers prefer to choose other locations for meeting the needs of their infant children). 

Meanwhile in Madrid art has certainly given the public plenty to chew over as ARCO 2016 sparked off its normal media coverage with the wacky and the wonderful jostling for media attention.

The other was in the regional parliament of the Basque Country, where a revolutionary proposal was discussed to increase both maternity and paternity leave to six months in order to guarantee the equality of the sexes, and although the motion was not passed in its entirety demands are now being made for the national government to move in this direction. 

Animals and wildlife

Animals in the news this week include three dogs which are being enlisted at the Hospital Teresa Herrera in A Coruña to take part in therapy for 25 children under the age of six who suffer from autism and other conditions associated with brain damage, and the rams of the town of Azpeitia in the Basque Country which are obliged to take part in weekly battles in the local bullring. The animal rights party Equo has reported the authorities in the town for allowing the combats, where two rams are pitted against each other for sport and head-butt each other repeatedly until one loses consciousness and is therefore deemed the loser. Senseless is how the losing rams end up, and critics would probably maintain that the same word is also appropriate for describing the holding of the contest in the first place.

Also on the topic of animals, the Seprona wildlife protection wing of the Guardia Civil successfully dismantled a network of individuals involved in the illegal export of sick animals to Dubai, having established that they used blood samples from healthy donkeys in order to obtain the necessary veterinary certificates to export zebras.

Crime and justice – the Spanish press await Princess Cristina’s declarations in court

In Palma de Mallorca the Nóos Case trial continues to attract a huge amount of attention, although the press will have to wait until at least next week for the long-awaited appearance on the stand of Princess Cristina, although her husband Iñaki Urdangarín began giving evidence on Friday. This week's proceeding consisted almost entirely of the declarations of Sr Urdangarín’s former business partner Diego Torres, who on Tuesday denied any wrongdoing and controversially implied that the Royal Household condoned all of the activities of the Instituto Nóos, the company he jointly owned and managed. His declarations lasted until well into Thursday, when, having begun to contradict himself, he abruptly refused to answer any more questions. 

In Valencia there have recently been numerous allegations made regarding corruption among local and regional politicians, and one of the consequences appears to have been this week’s decision by the Town Hall to rescind the two tourist bus contracts which are currently in force. Other travel-related news includes the re-opening of bidding for those hoping to buy the airport of Ciudad Real, which has not been used since 2012: anyone considering investing in the facility will need to meet a minimum asking price of 50 million euros, considerably more than the 10,000-euro bid which looked like being accepted at one point last year. 

Four more arrests were made this week in connection with Jihadism, three as part of a joint police operation in Spain and Morocco on Tuesday and another in Ceuta on Thursday, all of those detained having been involved in recruiting for Daesh and publicizing the cause of IS. Last year a total of 102 arrests for offences of this kind were made in this country, and at present it seems possible that the figure will rise in 2016.

More serious crime news in the Costa del Sol, where six Britons were arrested as they planned a gang murder in Marbella, while in Gran Canaria an 80-year-old man was arrested and charged with deliberately starting 14 fires over the last six years near the University of Las Palmas campus. No explanation has been offered for the behaviour of the arrested man.

One of the more interesting stories of the week, on the other hand, concerned a rather less meticulously planned crime in Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the Atlantic coast of the province of Cádiz, where hungry thieves unwittingly left an easy-to-follow trail which led to their prompt detention. The thieves took advantage of the fact that a bar was closed to break in and steal the television and the cash till, and then on the spur of the moment decided to take seven hams with them as well. This, as it turned out, was to prove their undoing.

In removing the hams from the premises they dragged them along the ground, leaving a trail of fat and oil which led directly to their home. The police, naturally enough, were called in to investigate, but by the time they arrived the bar owner’s wife and daughter had already done their own sleuthing, and directed officers straight to the address where the relevant arrests were made immediately.

Spanish property news

The positive news continues to roll in regarding the state of health of the residential property market in Spain, with the latest government figures published on Thursday reporting a 1.8% increase in average prices across the country during 2015. This is a less significant rise than those calculated last week by the country’s notaries and registrars (1.9% and 6.6% respectively), but all of the main sources of information now agree that the value of property in Spain is on the way up again.

Almost equally encouraging is the fact that the Ministry of Development reports that prices rose last year in almost all of Spain’s seventeen regions, the most significant upward movements being in the Balearics (5.4%), Madrid (3.4%), La Rioja (3.2%), Catalunya (3%) and the Canaries (also 3%). 

Across the country the average price of housing is now calculated to be 29.1% lower than at its peak in the first quarter of 2008, having risen by 2.4% since it reached its lowest point in the third quarter of 2014, and year-on-year rises have been recorded for three quarters in a row. 

At the same time both purchasers and banks are showing increased confidence in the market, and this is reflected by the fact in the course of 2015 the number of mortgage loans registered on residential property rose by 19.8%, with the total loan capital also increasing by 24.1%. The average loan capital last year was 105,930€, with a 3.6% year-on-year rise providing further evidence that property prices also rose. 

It has been highlighted many times that there are significant differences among the regional markets in Spain, but in terms of mortgage activity the upward curve is universal. The sharpest increases in the number of mortgages granted last year were in the Balearics (41.4%), and the upturn also amounted to over 20% in the regions of Catalunya, Murcia, the Canaries, Cantabria and Andalucía.

These data are only provisional for the time being, but it is unlikely that any significant alterations will have to be made and they demonstrate once again that not only are the banks in Spain now confident enough in the market to make credit more freely available, but purchasers also believe that the time is right to buy. The low interest rates at the moment make repayment terms more attractive than at any point since the Euribor became the determining factor in 1999, and while most people take advantage by contracting loans with variable interest rates, in December over 9% opted for the “safe option” of fixed-rate contracts. 

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