A digest of this week’s Spanish financial, political and social news aimed primarily at Foreign Property Owners:
Prepared by Lenox Napier. Consultant: José Antonio Sierra
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Editorial: Business over Tapas Nº 568
The FITUR – Spain’s gigantic tourism fair – is now over. Deals have been struck, hotels booked, new attractions publicised and above all, 2025 is met with optimism and faith.
The goal is to bring 100 million foreign tourists to Spain this year (it was 94m in 2024) – and to increase the money taken last year (a tidy 126,000 million euros), and just maybe increase the percentage of Spain’s GDP to be marked down to tourism.
Tourism is an excellent industry, as they come, they pay, and (best of all) they go. During their brief visit, they spend every day on drink, on food, on hotels and on souvenirs. Apart from a tee-shirt or a decorated pot, they won’t export anything from Spain in exchange for their money much beyond a hangover, a sunburn and maybe a secret telephone number or email address from someone they met at the hotel disco.
And all that lovely money. Most of it is spent in places where neither Spaniards nor foreign residents tend to go: whether the tour-hotels; those AirBnb homes; the spoiled and overcrowded attractions (think the Alhambra, the Grand Mosque, the Sagrada Familia or other ‘untenable popularity’ places as listed recently by Fodor), or indeed in the tacky souvenir shops. Those businesses relying on tourism – rather than residents – will have their own solutions to bring to the table: more tourism please, and let’s stop with that ‘Tourist Go Home’ stuff.
FITUR was good for tourism, but it was also good for Madrid. 225,000 people came to the show, and the city took in, says a tourist-page, an extra 445 million euros in those five days.
Spain, says CNN, and looking at the American market, is ‘the red-hot tourist destination’.
In his New Year’s speech, the mayor of Málaga Francisco De la Torre warned about La turismofobia and calls for moderation because, he said, «the success of Málaga» depends on tourism’. We need to take note of this, because not only does tourism help Spain’s GDP, it is also less tiresome for we residents than living in a town dedicated to factories or heavy industry.
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Housing:
‘Socialist Spain should be careful what it wishes for – the Germans are coming. Banning British nationals from buying property will replace one problem with another’. An interesting piece from the British champions of the Brexit, The Telegraph here.
From La Cronista here: ‘The Mayor of Barcelona Jaume Collboni has announced to the tourist rental platform Airbnb that the decision to extinguish by 2028 the licenses of the 10,000 temporary homes existing in the city and to end the figure of the tourist flat in Barcelona is «firm»’. The article says (quoting a spokesperson from PwC) that banning tourist apartments won’t affect ordinary rental prices.
Meanwhile, Idealista says that ‘Málaga, Valencia and Alicante are among ten cities with more tourist flats (VUTs) than hotels. The supply of holiday homes grew by 17.5% in 2024, six times more than the 2.9% increase in hotels’.
Good news for landlords: the Government approves a guarantee for the non-payment of rent. El Confidencial has the details (including that the rental price is within government guidelines).
Not quite a Senior Living Village (Diario As last week), but as Sur in English reports here: ‘Cohousing projects grow in popularity on the Costa del Sol. Vélez-Málaga is the latest town to announce a shared living space for older people, with 23 homes planned’.
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Tourism:
No point being made here, but you can see why the hotels don’t like visitors to stay elsewhere – whether an AirBnb, or in a caravan, or in the spare-room… Hotels, at least, have the advantage of being in a certain area, generally speaking. Leaving the holidaymakers in one part of the resort, while we residents enjoy the other part of town…
‘I have no neighbours’: over-tourism pushes residents in Spain and Portugal to the limit says The Guardian here. Another article on the proliferation of tourist flats.
From APNews here: ‘No, Spain isn’t banning tourists. Here’s what to know before planning a trip’. The article highlights the issue of the growing housing affordability problem.
‘Hotels in Spain increased their prices by 13% in 2024 to an average of 120 euros a night’ says Sur in English here.
Llafranch (Palafrugell): ‘It was one of the most beautiful fishing villages in Spain, but it has been turned into a tourist attraction, the paradise that everyone wanted to visit. That was its curse’ says Trendencias here.
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Seniors:
‘Bargain-priced holiday scheme for pensioners in Spain teases possibility of offering foreign destinations. «It is yet another incentive and we are open to all kinds of initiatives,» said Imserso‘s director general, Mayte Sancho’. Sur in English has the story.
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Finance:
Vozpópuli points to the data centre sector in Spain as shaping up to be one of the most dynamic in the world, with an estimated growth of between 25% and 30% per year until 2030. Spanish advantages are seen – says the article – as the geographical location, the availability of renewable energy, the capacity of the electricity grid, the low construction costs and the good digital connectivity. A later story notes that DeepSeek (the new Chinese AI) will oblige the redesign of more than a hundred data centres operating in Spain.
El Mundo reports that ‘Spanish GDP grew by 3.2% in 2024 after repeating the 0.8% increase in the fourth quarter. With this increase, the national Gross Domestic Product has been positive for four consecutive years, after 2.5% in 2023, 5.8% in 2022 and 6.4% in 2021. In 2024, domestic demand contributed 2.8 points to growth, 1.1 points higher than the previous year; while external demand contributed 0.4 points, six-tenths less than in 2023’.
Diario de Almería looks at the 85,000 foreign workers in the province here.
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Politics:
The combined forces of the right, PP, Vox and Junts defeated a Government motion on Wednesday last week to increase pensions, continue transport discounts and other items.
President Sánchez noted then that, ‘they could have abstained’. As it is, there are a lot of indignant people around. Defending the indefensible, Feijóo accused Sánchez of using the pensioners as «human shields»
Then it got interesting:
1 The PP votes against the rise in pensions for 2025.
2 The PP calls on people to sign a petition to raise the pensions for 2025.
And thus: 3 The PP collects signatures against the PP.
As someone notes: ‘I’m sure the pensioners would have preferred their 2025 increase rather than having to sign a petition at Change.org’.
On Sunday, President Sánchez said he would return the motion to Congress and ‘would find the necessary votes, even looking under the rocks’ says El País here. On Tuesday, the (mischievous?) Junts agreed to switch sides, allowing a re-vote on the main points of the motion. Thus, the transport subsidies to return and the 2025 pension increases are revalidated. 20Minutos has the details here. Juanlu Sánchez at elDiario.es (subscription) explains:
‘Anyway, pensions will go up. And the public transport subsidies will be reactivated again. The “social shield” will remain standing. The crisis is over. Junts has announced its vote in favour of the main measures that it rejected with the PP and Vox in Congress a week ago.
And what has convinced Junts? Well, the usual: validating their importance as a minor one-issue party. Junts has made us all lose a week of our lives just to be able to say that it conditions the Government’s policies. In the new decree, some measures that had gone more unnoticed have disappeared, such as tax benefits for autonomous communities and aid for the purchase of electric cars. But the essentials are there.
Pedro Sánchez calls this “the noise of democracies, which is always better than the silence of autocracies”’.
To round it off – the PP announced on Wednesday (29th January) that the party would also vote in favour of the new aid decree says 20Minutos. So just Vox remains in the cold.
‘The institutional vice-secretary and MEP of the PP Esteban González Pons has called on the Catholic Church to consider ordaining female bishops, similar to the Anglican Church.
Pons enthuses in an article of his published in Las Provincias last weekend called ‘una obispa así quiero yo’ noting that the US bishop Mariann Edgar Budde had asked Trump for clemency for migrants and homosexuals in the service held following his inauguration’, with Cadena Ser reporting here.
Following from an earlier criticism of Trump by the same Spanish MEP, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal has called on Feijóo to dismiss Esteban González Pons. The MEP for the PP had said that the victory of the American president (he calls him “the Orange Ogre”) means “the burial of democratic values”. The Partido Popular is also uneasy with these statements. Inter alia, we read here that Abascal had flown to Washington last week for the inauguration of Trump but was unable to join the group within the Capitol Rotunda. There were no photos of the Vox leader with Trump to take home, sad to say.
El Mundo says that ‘Sánchez strengthens alliance with China to confront Trump. Relevant figures of the PSOE such as Borrell and Zapatero serve as a bridge in the strategy of seeing Beijing more as an opportunity than as a threat’.
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Gibraltar:
‘Málaga airport, an irregular gateway to Schengen for passengers bound for Gibraltar’. The story at EuropaSur says that sometimes flights to Gibraltar are diverted to Málaga, perhaps due to the weather, and those aiming for the Rock are not subjected (as they should be) to Schengen entrance rules. Furthermore, ‘The chief inspector of the National Police on the border with the Rock says that several non-British non-EU citizens who landed on Monday at the Pablo Picasso airport did not reach the Rock, their declared destination’. We should expect to read that things will soon be tightened up.
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Europe:
‘I sense Brussels is ready to be bold and ambitious’: hope mixes with anger on Brexit’s fifth anniversary, says The Guardian here. We read, ‘…João Vale de Almeida, the former EU ambassador to London, says the future of UK/EU relations is now, as with so much else, being viewed in Brussels in the context of the far wider challenges thrown up by the return to the White House of Donald Trump…’
From La Razón here: ‘The British Chancellor is to consider the UK entry into a European trade deal. The Chancellor of the Exchequer argues that the post-Brexit deal negotiated by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is not allowing small businesses to export and does not solve the problems of large businesses’. ‘Betray Brexit and you will betray the British people at your peril’ warns The Express here.
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Courts:
Called to declare in front of the Court, Europa Press says here that the judge Inmaculada Iglesias has suspended the statement of Ayuso’s partner – between one thing and another – for the fourth time. Alberto González Amador has a professional trip to the United States between February 4 and 12, scheduled prior to his February 7th appointment with the Court. On Wednesday afternoon, not unreasonably, ‘The Prosecutor’s Office asks the judge to question Ayuso’s boyfriend before he goes on his trip’ says La Cadena Ser here.
Judge Ángel Hurtado, who, despite having no evidence, is very clear that the investigation into the State Attorney General has ‘gotta move forward’ as Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (chief advisor to Isabel Díaz Ayuso) says, nevertheless believes that Alberto González Amador, Ayuso’s partner, «has been labelled as a confessed fraudster, without being one, with the reputational damage that this entails». LaSexta questions the impartiality of the judge here.
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Media:
An interesting book called ‘Spanish Beauty’ by Esther Garcia Llovet here. It’s reviewed here by The Guardian under the title: ‘Washed-up Brits, local lowlifes and a Kray twin’s lighter: noir novel Spanish Beauty shines fond light on Benidorm’.
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Ecology:
From El Economista here: ‘During his inaugural speech at an Enagas function, Pedro Sánchez said that the key to the future will be (and he used the English neologism) «Green, Baby, Green.» For the president, the time has come to free ourselves from the monopoly on hydrocarbons and make renewables the passport to energy sovereignty…’
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Various:
‘Moving to another country can be incredibly exciting. Everything new can be quite intoxicating. You feel fully alive, almost like a child again. An adventurer or perhaps an explorer (although we are far from a Robinson Crusoe in today’s convenient jet age)…’ From Eye on Spain here, ‘The Newcomers’.
Means well, maybe… The Olive Press here brings us: ‘It is estimated health facilities could save between two and seven million euros by providing music to patients. Music releases stress and anxiety in intensive care patients, says a study by the group Musicos por la Salud’. Personally, I like it nice and quiet in my hospital bed.
For walkers perhaps… ‘Laberintus Park, the largest hedge maze in Spain, opens late this February in Humilladero, Málaga. The plant labyrinth combines a design inspired by the Alhambra in Granada, sustainable technology and educational activities for all ages. The easiest route will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, while the most difficult challenge will take up to two hours’. Sur in English has the story, and, we hope, a cold beer for anyone who makes it through…
‘Ryanair founder and chairman Michael O’Leary on Wednesday called the Spanish Minister for Social Rights, Consumption and Agenda 2030, Pablo Bustinduy, a «crazy communist» for the 179 million euro fines imposed on five low-cost airlines (Ryanair, Vueling, Easyjet, Norwegian and Volotea) for charging for hand luggage’. 20Minutos has more.
In Spain, a new-born child takes the nationality of his parents, rather than automatically becoming Spanish. Maldita explains the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis.
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See Spain:
ABC brings us ‘Benitaglia, The small pueblo in Almería with a peculiar name and only sixty inhabitants. A municipality nestled in the Sierra de Los Filabres that has Arab origins and is surrounded by oak trees’.
‘The Lost Tastes of Medieval Andalusian Cuisine: A Wealth of Spices and Flavours’, a list of interesting seasonings from Medievalists.net (‘Where the Middle ages begin’) here.
Córdoba Restaurants: Foodie Tips + Local Bites from Molly at Piccavey here.
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Finally:
Lapurasangre & Pedro Pastor – Bruja on YouTube here (do I ever disappoint?).
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