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Spanish News Today Editors Roundup Weekly Bulletin Sept 22
FEATURED ARTICLES: "Deadline for expats to secure a full UK state pension extended" and "Drivers to save money in 2024 as Spain motorway charges scrapped"
Summer is a joy here in Spain, and it’s no small number of foreigners who immigrate here for the good weather. That said, it’s not hard to find expats who say they prefer any other month of the year than summer, it’s so bloomin’ hot, and that’s a sentiment that will be especially common this year after the stifling heatwaves we’ve had in July and August.
Good news, then, as temperatures begin their slow descent, the rain becomes more frequent, and we prepare to welcome autumn. The new season officially begins this Saturday, September 23, with the Autumnal Equinox – one of only two days in the year when day and night are exactly the same length – and the days will begin to get shorter from now on.
The two stories which have most gripped (and in large part, angered) the public in Spain this week are the poor teenage girls who had ‘nude’ photos of them posted all around school and the community, even though they had never posed nude and the naked bodies were a simulation created by AI, and the new change in the Spanish congress which allows not just the Spanish language but other local minority languages such as Catalan, Galician and Basque to be spoken, requiring members of parliament to wear simultaneous in-ear translation devices to understand delegates from their own country.
But for expats who live and own property in the country, the biggest Spain stories to emerge this week are that the deadline to secure a full UK state pension has been extended by two years, and that the dreaded change to turn all motorways in Spain into toll roads in 2024 will NOT come to pass.
We’ve got the full scoop for you below:
For whom the bell tolls
Everybody breathe a sigh of relief. The Spanish government’s controversial plan to start charging for every single motorway or ‘autovía’ in the country has been overthrown by the bosses in Brussels.
As such, the proposal to convert all the country’s highways into toll roads in 2024 – thereby making driving almost anywhere much more expensive – will now not come into effect.
It was the Spanish government itself which applied to have the measure overturned by the European Commission, which was the body that imposed the need to start paying for maintenance of the country’s road network in the first place.
When the general election was in full swing here in Spain, President Pedro Sánchez – despite all evidence to the contrary – had been insisting that the toll roads would not materialise because they would be too much of a financial burden on regular people given the current economic climate.
It was all taken as empty election promises, of course, but now it seems he’s come good on it and Europe will “remove from the Recovery Plan the initial idea of introducing payment for the use of highways”.
Instead of toll roads, then, the government now aims to meet the targets of the European Recovery Plan by different means, namely by creating a ‘Sustainable Mobility Law’ that will instead promote and subsidise public transport as a sustainable alternative to private vehicles.
The crux of the plan, as it stands now in its infancy, is to make it a cheaper and more attractive option for companies to move freight by rail rather than in lorries. As more details emerge of the Sustainable Mobility Law, there may be further subsidies and incentives for private individuals to choose train travel and other public transport measures rather than driving.
It’s very early days, yet, but this could spell good news for anyone travelling around Spain. We’ll keep you apprised as we find out more…
Deadline for expats to secure a full UK state pension extended
The way you build up your pension pot is by having it paid into when you are in employment or you are claiming certain benefits. But what about if you emigrate from your country and there are gaps in your records? In this case, a shortfall could mean you’re not entitled to a full state pension from your home country, but rather just a partial pension.
Previously, anyone from the UK who missed a few years was able to make a ‘voluntary contribution’ to make up for those gaps, which could be a very profitable move for some. By spending as little as £800 to bridge the gaps in their records, they could see a return of £5,500 or more on their pension pot.
Well, the UK government was going to scrap the possibility of making these gap-filling contributions this July, so that you could no longer pull this ‘trick’ to ensure you get a full UK state pension. Thankfully, they have decided to extend the deadline until April 2025, meaning that any taxpayers now have a further two years to fill any gaps in their National Insurance record between 2006 and 2016.
The welcome extension comes in the wake of numerous reports from users that crucial government helplines were totally unreachable in the run-up to the July deadline. The helplines managed by HMRC and the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) were inundated with calls, overloading the system. Many callers expressed frustration at being unable to get through to anyone, despite calling multiple times.
Now, though, a sort of two-year grace period has been granted in which anyone who thinks they may be affected by a gap in their UK National Insurance record can check and see if making a voluntary contribution could help them receive their full UK pension.
But just because you’ve got another two years left is no excuse to dally. As you can probably imagine, the process is not a short or simple one, and involves contacting the Pension Service (if you’re already at state pension age) or The Future Pension Centre if you’re below the state pension age; calling HMRC to obtain a unique 18-digit reference number, without which it’s impossible to verify which years in your records are ‘incomplete’.
What’s more, the cost of those contributions is going up by a significant 10.1% (with the exception of the years 2021/22 and 2022/23, which will remain the same). As a result, the price of filling a full year in your National Insurance record will increase to £907.40. The sooner you get this sorted, the more likely you are to avoid further price hikes.
For Brits living overseas, it takes even longer as, while they can – for the most part – save money by being eligible for Class 2 rather than Class 3 contributions, the application process for Class 2 adds an additional step to the process.
Making contributions to fill gaps in a pension record is not the right option for everyone, but it is definitely something that every UK citizen living in Spain should be aware of and consult with a financial advisor whether it affects them or not and what the best course of action should be.
Nude photos of underage girls created with artificial intelligence in Spain
The advance of the Internet has undoubtedly made life easier in many ways but its darker underbelly has caused many a sleepless night for parents of vulnerable teens. And this week, the worst nightmares of a group of parents in the Spanish town of Almendralejo in Badajoz came true when nude photos of their young daughters surfaced online.
But all was not as it seemed. While the pictures did indeed show the faces of dozens of children aged between 12 and 17, they had been superimposed using artificial intelligence onto naked bodies that certainly weren’t their own, and spread far and wide on social media.
Alarmingly, the sordid ordeal appears to have started in a children’s WhatsApp group and escalated from there.
So far, Badajoz police have taken statements relating to 23 victimised children and several suspects, all minors, have been arrested.
According to legal experts in gender violence and Internet law, whatever the age of the culprits, the act of creating and sharing the photos constitutes a crime of child pornography, the prison term for which ranges between one and none years.
What’s more, the penalties not only apply to those who create and distribute the images in the first place, but also to anyone who subsequently replicates or redistributes them.
Learn Spanish by numbers
Learning Spanish and making an effort to improve our language skills is often something that can feel secondary, and many times we put it on the back-burner. If only there were an easy trick for the social media, instant gratification, easy answers generation that we could all just plug into…
In a continuation of our not-at-all regular feature explaining titbits and curiosities about the Spanish language, here’s a nice, neat list for you of words and phrases that will give your Spanish a bit of a boost simply by memorising something you already probably know a bit of – the numbers.
There are loads of idiomatic expressions in Spanish that use numbers, and being able to whip out a choice saying at the right moment will help make you sound like a proper Spaniard and really impress your friends.For instance, if you’re at a restaurant and there’s hardly anything on the menu, you could mention to your friend that ‘Hay cuatro cositas aquí’, meaning ‘There are four things here’. Why four? Well, it doesn’t literally mean there are just four items on the menu. Rather, four is a number the Spanish often use to say there are not many of something. The typical example is ‘Había cuatro gatos’, meaning there were not a lot of people there.
In contrast, the number eight is used as a way to say there’s a lot of something, e.g. ‘¡Te lo he dicho ocho veces ya!’ (‘I’ve already told you eight times!’). And why eight? Well, it’s anyone’s guess really but the mathematically minded among you may notice it is twice as much as four. Just saying…
Sticking with eight, here’s a really nice Spanish saying for you: ‘Con esto y un bizcocho, hasta mañana a las ocho’. Literally translated, it means ‘With that and a cake, until tomorrow at eight’ and is notable for rhyming in both Spanish and English. But what does it mean? This phrase is used to say either goodnight, goodbye, or that you’ve had enough or something is finished. A proper Spanish way to clock off for the day, saying that nothing else will be done until 8am the next morning!
Murcia
Love them or hate them, cruise ships are – at least according to what the stats suggest – becoming a more popular form of tourism in recent years. Murcia already has its cruise city par excellence in Cartagena, where many Mediterranean cruises let of thousands of passengers each year.
Some of those passengers choose to hop on a bus and go to visit the famous town of Mazarrón, even though it’s a 2-hour journey. Ostensibly to help out those souls, but also to give the local economy a massive boost, the Town Council of Mazarrón is pushing hard to make the Port of Mazarrón the latest cruise ship destination on the Mediterranean.
It’s an unofficial announcement for now and really we will have to wait until the end of this month for the Council to make its presentation to the Cartagena Maritime Captaincy and the shipping company, who will be in charge of taking the decision upstairs for the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda to sign off on. At the earliest, the Port of Mazarrón could not be ready to receive cruise passengers before 2024.However, anyone who has ever been to Puerto de Mazarrón will know that it’s really not set up for cruise ships to come in and dock. For starters, the water only goes down 3 metres at its deepest point, whereas at the Cartagena docks it is 24 metres deep. The basic plan, then, is a setup similar to what currently exists in Monaco, where yachts can dock but the largest cruise ships will have to weigh anchor off the coast and shuttle passengers to shore on smaller boats.
Another obstacle to be overcome includes the introduction of a customs service manned by border force agents. But such concerns are a trifling matter for Mazarrón Town Council, and the ambitious plan – if it comes to fruition – would situate the town as an important recognised tourist destination not only in Murcia, but at a Mediterranean level. Whether the influx of crowds that would entail is really such a good thing for the locals who live there is questionable, but it would certainly ring in big changes for the otherwise hidden gem of a town that is Mazarrón.
Other local advances are afoot, with the private Mederi Guadalentín hospital on the Camposol urbanisation now scheduled to open earlier than was first expected, with the final step of furnishing the new hospital building and installing the specialist equipment due to begin in the first three months of 2024. Meanwhile, the sports area on Camposol looks set to get even more facilities. In addition to the monkey bars, elliptical trainer, pedal seats, exercise bench and table tennis table that are currently in place, the urbanisation’s sports facilities could soon have extra lines painted on the football pitch so it can be used as a basketball and badminton court, as well as a changing room, a padel/pickleball court and floodlights so the area can be used in the evenings.
Talking of sports, the first ever Micasamo Nations Cup which we told you about last week and which happened last weekend on La Manga Club was, by all accounts, a massive success.
Hotly contested between mixed teams representing the nations of Belgium and the British Isles, the eventual winners of the astounding-looking trophy were the Brits, led ably by team captain Sallie. Modest in victory, she commented, “The British Isles won overall but I think the overall winner was Alain from the Belgium team who brought the whole tournament together.”
Buoyed by the positive response to the competition, Alain is planning the next edition of the Micasamo Nations Cup for the end of October, with more details to come at a later date.
Open-air street markets are an ever-popular activity and make for a lovely morning out that feels so typically Spanish. Now, market lovers and stall browsers are being treated to a brand-new weekly street market in Cartagena, which started this Tuesday in El Albujón.
The market has been a long time coming, with El Albujón locals demanding it for years and the City Council having modified the Municipal Ordinance on Street Vending to accommodate it a full 12 months ago.Now, though, the El Albujón market is finally up and running and will be held every Tuesday morning throughout the year. There are a total of 19 market stalls selling food, clothes, shoes and more.
Alas, when one door opens another one closes, and the start of the new market coincides with the end of the summer season of street markets, which means that the markets in Los Urrutias, La Azohía, Islas Menores, Isla Plana and Los Nietos will all be closed until next summer.
Check out our EVENTS DIARY for events and activities coming up in the Region of Murcia:
Spain
Spain’s Organisation of Consumer and Users (OCU) has threatened to lodge a formal complaint against budget airline Ryanair if it doesn’t address its dodgy check-in practices, which it says is causing customers a fortune.
According to the group, a glitch in the system means that passengers trying to check in through the website or the app are frequently met with an error message, forcing them to pay between 30 and 50 euros extra for a boarding pass at the airport desk. This is especially a problem for those who book their flights through third party companies or travel agents.
This is far from the first time Ryanair’s questionable practices have been highlighted by the Spanish authorities. Just last month, the Irish airline, along with six others, was investigated by the Spanish Ministry of Consumer Affairs for alleged irregularities in their hand luggage policy and seat allocation.
The OCU has warned Ryanair that if it doesn’t remedy this “new abuse” it won’t hesitate to file a formal complaint with the General Directorate of Consumer Affairs.
Check-in charges were the least of the worries for passengers in Mallorca this week when two packed tourist planes collided on the airport taxiway in Palma.
According to shocked passengers, a Condor jet covering the Palma-Frankfurt route was at a standstill on the tarmac, waiting for take-off, when an Air Europa plane arriving from Barcelona touched down and rammed into the back of the Condor.
Más información, visual al menos... #Palma #PMI #Mallorca #LEPA 😒😒😒🧐🧐🧐 pic.twitter.com/w4dYukC7GP
— Iván Castro Palacios (@ivancp25) September 19, 2023
The wing of the Air Europa plane snapped off and will need “a bit of refurbishment,” according to Aena, but thankfully nobody was injured in the frightening incident. The waiting holidaymakers were undoubtedly disappointed though, as subsequent flights scheduled for the aircraft involved were cancelled.
Staying with Mallorca and a violent Irish tourist had to be forcefully subdued by police when he threatened other holidaymakers with a knife following a heated argument about politics.
Hotel staff in Andratx municipality in the western part of Mallorca phoned the police shortly after 1am on Wednesday September 13 claiming the man was “out of control”.
When police arrived at the establishment, they had to break through the door of the unnamed man’s hotel room and were forced to pepper spray him when he resisted arrest.
Shockingly, local reports claim that several other guests threw objects at the police as they led the suspect away in handcuffs.
Finally, the Spanish health authorities have withdrawn from market a popular brand of roll-on cream deodorant this week and warned any consumers who might have already purchased the item not to use it. The French authorities did the same last week when several people reported developing painful underarm cysts after using the Nuud BV brand.
According to the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS), the undesirable effects could be related to the consistency and oily nature of the product, which would lead to the clogging of the pores in the application area (armpits).Unfortunately, at this stage, AEMPS can’t rule out a possible health risk in consumers who have used the Nuud product in Spain. The item is normally sold online but it’s also readily available in supermarkets, independent shops and pharmacies across the country.
However, further investigation into the matter is needed since the Nuud brand complies with all of the Spanish regulations related to cosmetic products.
Alicante
There are plenty of weird and wonderful traditions to delight curious visitors in Spain and in Alicante’s tourist capital Benidorm, the activities are known to tend towards the raucous and naughty. It might come as a surprise then that one of the city’s more colourful customs actually forms part of the religious Hermitage of Sanz celebration.
The locally-named ‘Cagà de la Burra’ fiesta is a hilarious if rather smelly experience that revolves around watching a donkey pooping.
Essentially, a plot of land is divided into hundreds of small numbered squares and participants are invited pay 10 euros for one of the numbers. The ass is placed in position and whoever’s square it does its business on is the winner. The prize money for the competition, held this year on September 17, was 1,000 euros.
All of the money raised from the unusual tradition will go towards paying for the festivities that will be celebrated in honour of Sant Antoni this coming January.
The frightening discovery of a badly decomposed corpse this week has shaken the quiet and close-knit expat community of Lomas de Cabo Roig to its core. The grisly find was made by a group of workers replacing irrigation pipes in a field beside a farm, close to the Orihuela Costa Sewage Plant.
According to official sources, the body is that of a young man dressed in beach attire, but a positive identification has yet to be made. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, the experts believe the remains could have been hidden for several months, but a post-mortem will need to be carried out to establish the exact date and cause of death.
On to more pleasant things and the La Mata boardwalk in Torrevieja is finally getting a much-needed facelift after more than a decade of complaints and requests. The shore-front path, which winds its picturesque way between Los Mediterráneos avenue and the salt canal, and the Molino del Agua municipal natural park has been in a state of disrepair for years and should take around 12 months to be put to rights.
The City Council will allocate 3,929,612 euros to replacing the 1,317 linear metres of path, which will be divided up into three distinct projects: the north section, between the northern limit of the municipal area and Plaza Encarnación Puchol in the Torrevieja town of La Mata; the central section, between the south of Plaza de Encarnación Puchol and Avenida de Los Europeans; and the south section, located entirely in the Molino del Agua Park.
Over the course of 12 months, contractors will remove all of the old wooden promenade in the north and central sections and replace it with fresh materials, while damaged parts of the southern section, which is in a better state of repair, will be touched up. The entire area will also get new LED lighting.
Andalucía
As we reported in last week’s bulletin, the number of Covid-19 cases is rising steeply at the moment and, while it manifests in a much less serious way for most people thanks to the mass vaccination campaigns that were carried out, the truth is that the imminent return of the cold weather in the upcoming autumn/winter season means health authorities are scrambling to try and give out booster shots within the next few weeks.
Andalucía is the latest autonomous community in Spain to announce that it will be giving out joint Covid and flu vaccinations from mid-October, but it won’t be rolled out to the general populace.
Instead, it will be the elderly, vulnerable and immunocompromised people who will be targeted with this vaccination campaign, as well as health professionals like doctors and nurses who work closely with at-risk people.
While the official start date of the vaccination campaign has not been finalised yet, the Andalusian Ministry of Health is aiming to start on Monday October 16.
The advantage of offering a joint vaccine, they say, is that you only have to go and get jabbed once, not twice. In addition, the new doses of the Covid vaccine, which have been manufactured by Pfizer, are already adapted to help them fight against the newest strain of coronavirus, BA.2.86.
From preserving life to planning for after it ends, and the Costa del Sol is rushing ahead with its new public pet cemetery, the first of its kind in Spain. Admittedly, it has been seven years in the making, but Málaga finally looks set to open up its municipal pet cemetery by the end of this year.
The cemetery will be located within the existing people cemetery, the Cementerio Parcemasa, in Málaga city, for which special dispension has had to be granted to expand the scope of the graveyard’s remit. The new facilities have cost over 1 million euros and a veterinary office, a crematorium and a special ‘farewell room’ where owners can say a final goodbye to their pets.
There are already four separate, privately run pet cemeteries in the area, but the new public site for dogs and cats has a burial area in the nearby pine forest and a green space for scattering ashes. What’s more, it is cheaper than the private ones, as the prices for burials and cremations have been based on what the private cemeteries normally charge, and then a little bit knocked off.
Málaga is the province with the highest number of pets in Andalucía, and there are nearly 100,000 registered in the provincial capital alone. A recent survey concluded that 89% of people with a dog in their care would use one of the services soon to be offered by Parcemasa.
You may have missed…
- Troubling report sheds light on the real causes of pollution in the Mar Menor.
A new study commissioned by Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge has provided an exhaustive analysis of the various polluting sources harming the Mar Menor. - British teens arrested for trashing Spanish hotel room.
Two badly behaved British teens have been arrested in the Mallorca party resort of Magaluf and ordered to pay a hefty fine after trashing a hotel room during a drunken fight. - The expat who has been arrested 20 times for avoiding Alicante restaurant bills by faking a heart attack.
A 50-year-old Lithuanian man has taken the old dine and dash scam to a whole new level in Alicante, ordering pricey meals and drinks before feigning a heart attack to get out of paying... not once but 20 times! - Body of expat woman, 21, found dumped on Costa del Sol street.
The lifeless body of a young woman discovered in Torremolinos on Wednesday September 13 has been identified as a 21-year-old Norwegian citizen who had only been resident in Spain for a year when she died. - A-7 dual carriageway to get a third lane.
Spain’s Ministry of Transport has put out to tender the construction of a third lane of traffic on the A-7 Autovía del Mediterráneo road in Alicante, in the area where it borders on the Region of Murcia.
And that’s your Editor’s Roundup Weekly Bulletin for this week. Thank you for reading and we’ll be back next week.
¡Con esto y un bizcocho, hasta la semana que viene!
Jajajaja...
