Business over Tapas (Nbr 656)

Editorial:

I got an invite last week from Jon Clarke the editor of The Olive Press to come along to his lair on the Costa del Sol and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that august publication.

It’s a longish drive down there from my corner of Almería, especially in my elderly banger with no heating (that early morning start) and only the one cassette to stimulate me on the entertainment-console. It’s a bugger actually, as everyone says that oh, they just threw out a box of them only last month.

Coincidentally, the festivities fall on my birthday which is the very day that my Spanish driving licence goes phut.

I had a newspaper once, back in the eighties and nineties. It was based in Mojácar and eventually ran to three weekly editions in English plus a monthly in Spanish. Times were harder then – the local businesses weren’t so open to advertising as they appear to be now, and the national companies didn’t want to know – even when my wife would squeeze into a business suit and do the rounds in Madrid. Turned out that large companies exclusively use agencies who get a cash chuck-back from the newspapers and magazines where they place the advert. Then, foreign-language newspapers (unless they are owned by Spanish corporations) never receive institutional advertising anyway: after all, what would be the point of bribing/pleasing/manipulating a newspaper whose readers don't have the vote?

One lives and learns.

A second problem in those days was that no one had heard of desk-top publishing. We had to type out texts, print them up on bits of paper, cut them to size on a light-box, paste the whole thing together and fit a black and white photo here and there. Fiddly enough when it’s an article – but then along comes the client who wanted a special decoration on his advert, good for one insertion and was there a discount? That was the only income you would find from a free-sheet, so – as usual – the customer was always right.

Once the pages had been completed, we would haul the whole jim-cracker to the printers, 90 minutes away. Three times a week, usually me in the company Lada. Listening to a cassette. I had a few of them in those days to choose from. A few hours later, say six in the morning, the paper was ready, in bundles, to be whisked away to favoured locations.

At least, and unlike its successor, it had news, articles and entertainment within.

One day we got a tiny Macintosh computer, where you could create a page on the screen. They called it ‘desktop publishing’. Marvelous! Then a year or two later colour arrived. No more blue-splash on the front and back, we suddenly had a full palette (unless the printers cocked it up). If that wasn’t enough, after a million trips taking the entire paper along to the city on a diskette or three, the Internet arrived (with that whizz, buzz whoosh noise as the phone was connected) and instead we could send the whole thing down the wire. It still took a long time, but the Modern Age was arriving for sure.

There were a few other problems too, employees can be crafty and a couple of them ended up with the paper, such is life.

I retired to do other stuff and here we are, twenty-five years later. Newspapers are pretty-much dead now, with the national titles losing sales every year and the kiosks closing down, with everybody moving to the Internet where there’s no limit to the page-size, or the links, or the ease-of-access or (above all) the incredible savings in production costs.

The Olive Press employs professional journalists (unlike its competitors) and produces a now monthly print-edition across Spain with a number of useful supplements. But its strength is in its web-edition, its investigative reporting and its attention to the subject at hand: Spain.

Thus, they will be celebrating later this month, but I like to think that I was there first.

Housing:

From Mark Stücklin’s Spanish Property Insight here: ‘If your property hasn’t sold in three months, something’s wrong’.

Idealista has: ‘Housing is now Spain’s biggest worry, concerning more than half the population. From 42% to 54%: housing anxiety surges across Spain in just one year.’

Spanish Property Insight looks at ‘The flaws at the heart of the government’s housing policy’ here.

Seniors:

From ECD here: ‘Medical alert: four out of every ten people over the age of 65 do not get vaccinated against the flu. Specialists warn that Spain remains far from its immunization targets and point out that this disease causes approximately 1,600 deaths and 29,000 hospitalizations each season.’

El 29N te juegas tu pensión, leaflet about the threat to your pension from the PPox.

Finance:

‘Renewables save Spain 26 billion dollars (something over 23,000 million euros) in natural gas costs’ says Inspenet here. ‘The expansion of solar and wind energy reduced Spain’s natural gas imports between 2011 and 2024, according to the International Energy Agency’.

From El Economista here: ‘In Germany, they find Spain’s economic boom hard to believe, and they maintain that it is not merely a rebound: "There are far more people working than before."’. Analysts from Commerzbank say that ‘Spain’s economy has been Europe’s major positive surprise in recent years. Moreover, all signs point to a strong increase in Spain’s potential GDP—as the Banco de España noted a few months ago—which allows the economy to grow more vigorously without creating macroeconomic imbalances. German analysts, for their part, claim to have identified the formula behind this Spanish "miracle": the large-scale arrival of immigrants from Latin America and labour market reforms. Spain has achieved something that Germany failed to accomplish a few years ago: the successful integration of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, who have also managed to enter the labour market quickly and effectively…’

According to Infobae here, ‘Spain is now the third-largest economy in the EU with the highest salaries, reaching 35,125 euros per year in 2025. The average full-time adjusted salary grew by 4.8% compared to 2024; despite this progress, the country remains below the EU average, which stands at 41,464 euros’.

‘Spain's travel and tourism sector is projected to contribute more than 269,000 million euros (US$300 billion) to the national economy in 2026, up 4.1% from the previous year, amid continued growth in international arrivals. The projection, made by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), follows a record-breaking 2025, when travel and tourism contributed 259,000 million euros, equivalent to 15.3% of Spain's GDP, and supported 3.2 million jobs…’ Found at VNExpress here.

Politics:

Wednesday was the General Strike. It was mainly focused on the housing shortage.

Campaigning begins in earnest this Friday. The various parties asking for our vote for November 29th. Unfortunately, most BoT readers can’t. Worse though, are those who can vote but can’t be bothered. In the last general election, that came to almost thirteen million people – 34.4% – who stayed home.

The PPox are keen, so the story goes, on bullfights and flag-waving. Not so much on schools, culture and foreigners. From Bilbaohiria here: ‘Fewer scientists and more bullfighters in the Andalucía budget from the PP and Vox’. We read: ‘Research and innovation funding will decrease by 97.1 million—a 24.4% drop—in the 2027 budget, even as the overall budget grows by 3,118.8 million; a spending plan that Juanma Moreno has presented as "the largest budget in history."’.

El País in English says: ‘Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Spain’s opposition leader: ‘Whether a coalition government with Vox is formed does not depend on me’. The article includes an interview. ‘With polls pointing to a Partido Popular victory on November 29, the politician is leaving the door open to governing with support from the far-right group’. Well, quite! Indeed, a vote for either of these parties comes in essence to the same thing.

Crime and Punishment:

A massive fuss at just the wrong moment. From El HuffPost here: ‘Koldo García claims to Cadena SER that a lawyer for the PP offered him one million euros in exchange for implicating Pedro Sánchez in a scandal. The funds were to come from OkDiario—a news outlet run by Eduardo Inda—which, in turn, would obtain the money through institutional advertising paid for by the autonomous communities governed by the PP.

From LaSexta here: ‘Isabel Peralta, leader of the neo-Nazi group Núcleo Nacional, kept four rifles at her home. The young woman was arrested last Friday during a simultaneous operation across seven Spanish provinces, which resulted in 14 arrests; those detained were initially accused of crimes including incitement to hatred, illicit association, and illegal possession of weapons’.

From Público here: ‘The Ministry for Children has asked the Data Protection Agency to halt TikTok’s operations in Spain. Minister Sira Rego stated that "if it were up to us, it would be suspended as of this Monday," and explained that, following a meeting with the social media platform, no "solutions were put on the table."’. The issue? An investigation at Maldita shows that TikTok allows improper children’s sexual content.

Media:

On Monday night, two political interviews at the same time. Pedro Sánchez on La Séptima was answering questions without saying anything new, while Santiago Abascal was on LaRevuelta (a whimsical talk-show) on national TV’s Channel 1. The Vox leader had asked for (and got) his own supporters to make up the audience. He comically suggested to Broncano at one point that shows like this one might not continue once the PPox had control of the public RTVE. How we laughed. La Séptima video . LaRevuelta video here.