Editorial:
Our village fiesta coincides with both the end of August and the day when everybody must pack the car with suitcases, family and a straw donkey and join the caravan heading back to the city. A little bit sunburned, a little lighter in the wallet and a slight headache from that late last-night revelry.
School, work and various obligations call for many if not all our visitors. But there will be some folk, with less encumbrances, to buck the trend and set out for the resorts now in September, knowing that there are fewer crowds and rather better weather.
There were six point nine million vehicles chasing each other home for operación retorno this past weekend. The cities fill up, and the resorts – if not now empty – have certainly taken a hit.
Between the swarms of Spanish holidaymakers and the foreign tourists (the INE claims 11.3 million during August), things have been decidedly busy. Employment has been high – even if a lot of those jobs (as everyone who can will have taken a holiday) have been filled by Latin Americans or the few Eastern Europeans who haven’t returned to their countries, considerably wealthier than when they left ten or twenty years ago.
Spain spends a lot on promoting tourism. Google says that Spain invests tens of millions of euros annually on direct international marketing through its official tourism body, Turespaña: with advertising, influencers, national and regional promotions (like ‘Think You Know Spain? Think Again’), the easy call of Sun, Sea and Sangria, plus various international tourist fairs: the giant one in Madrid, Fitur, which is held in January, along with the others in Berlin, London and so on.
Tourism creates lots of jobs, lots of money. Even the destinations themselves will have spent some of their budget on sprucing up the gardens, the streets and beaches. How much is a fully-grown transplanted palm-tree anyway?
It also creates its own problems. ‘Go Home Tourist’ daubed on the wall, or the locks for the airbnb apartments filled with super-glue. In Palma, or Barcelona or Marbella. Less tourism, more available homes for Spaniards!
In 2024, domestic and international tourism combined accounted for 12.6% of Spain’s GDP, or 200,699 million euros. Tourism generated more than 2.7 million jobs, representing 12.3% of total employment. The international tourist expenditure in 2024 was around 126,000 million euros.
But back in 2020, with the coronavirus, the numbers were very different: In short, tourism, particularly foreign tourism, whether from disease, war or climate, is fickle.
Whereas residential tourism, as the Spanish like to refer to us guiris, is constant. A tourist may have little loyalty to Spain, but we’ve hung our hats here. Like them, our money largely comes from elsewhere. They might spend a few hundred euros on their holidays (how much of that actually reaches Spanish hands?), while we have a house, a car, twelve months of shopping and a new kitchen appliance under our belt. One foreign resident of the expat variety could easily have spent the same in a twelve-month period as a hundred tourists.
Google says that ‘Spain is home to over 1.5 million foreign residents from high-income, Western nations’. Multiply that by one hundred, and we are worth to Spain as much or even more than international tourism. The figure would be considerably higher if someone fixed the 90/180 rule for non-Europeans, since many foreigners own homes in Spain which they can’t fully enjoy.
We may not fill the pockets of hoteliers and other powerful lobbyists in the tourist industry, but we bring our money to lawyers, builders, dentists, vets, mechanics and shopkeepers.
I ask, where are the state-sponsored promotions – ‘Come live in Spain: You’ll love it’? And I find the answer with Google AI here: ‘Severe domestic housing crises, inflation, and local backlash have forced a policy split. Governments now actively court tourists for fast economic injections while penalizing foreign homebuyers to protect local real estate markets’, the post contrasts the ‘Red Carpet Treatment’ for tourism from the authorities with a ‘Cold Shoulder’ for settlers.
I don’t believe that we affect the real-estate market as much as is feared, as most of us inactive retired types (at least) prefer to live in small villages in the hinterlands or on the coast rather than in a seventh-floor apartment in Madrid.
We also take pride in our surroundings and rarely stay up until 4.00am – and are almost never sick in the shrubbery on our street.
And when we residents decide on a whim to transform ourselves briefly into tourists, we will stay in Paradors or other nice hotels as we explore little-known regions of Spain, arriving with our (Spanish-bought) car and, at least, a smattering of spoken Spanish.
Housing:
Expatica has ‘House prices in Spain. What homes cost in Spain right now, how prices are moving, and what to budget for as a foreign buyer’ (it appears to be for cities only).
The Olive Press brings us ‘Spain’s expat havens: These are the towns where foreign buyers outnumber Spanish ones – sometimes by two to one’. None of the pueblos listed are cities.
‘Eight Things You Must Know Before Installing a Swimming Pool in Spain’ – a useful guide from Eye in Spain here. ‘How much does a swimming pool add to the value of a property in Spain?’, asks Spanish Property Insight here. The article notes that ‘A recent study by property portal pisos.com comparing homes with and without swimming pools across Spain’s 50 provinces found some extraordinary differences in asking prices’.
From Sur in English here: ‘Tourists and students snap up rental properties, reducing the supply of long-term accommodation in Granada city centre. Temporary flats now account for 40 per cent of the housing stock in the city, making it difficult to live under the same roof for more than 11 months in a row’.
Perhaps a pinch of salt with this one from VnExpress (Vietnam) here: ‘Village in world's 2nd most visited country turns to digital nomads to fight depopulation. Benarraba, a mountain village of around 350 people in Málaga province, is welcoming digital nomads in an effort to revive its local economy and strengthen community life…’
Tourism:
The Majorca Daily Bulletin says that there will be ‘No more paying for seat reservations on planes: the European Union bans airlines from separating families with children. Airlines will have to include the cost of one piece of hand luggage in the basic ticket price displayed on search engines’.
We may be familiar with the dinner for one experience. Restaurants don’t like it and neither, I suppose, do we. Especially if we are the delegated driver (sigh!). From elDiario.es here, ‘A Table for One: Why It's So Hard to Eat Well When You Travel Alone. In a country addicted to distilling its gastronomy into miniature portions, whether in the form of tapas or larger dishes, the paradox arises that solo travellers increasingly encounter obstacles to, well: eating’. There’s not much profit in a bowl of soup and a Coca Cola.
From Público here: ‘A new protest in Palma denounces overtourism and demands solutions. Citizen and environmental groups are calling on institutions to take urgent measures to alleviate tourist pressure and improve the quality of life for Mallorca residents’.
Of the 97m international tourists that chose Spain in 2025, a little over 14m were cruise passengers, spending a commensurately short time on shore… (Google AI)
Finance:
‘The extreme summer has cost Spain over €20,000 million and jeopardizes the future of the economy. A report by Triodos Bank indicates that the heat will reduce GDP by 1% this year, and tourism is already beginning to suffer in the hottest destinations. Agriculture, construction, and transportation will be increasingly affected’. More at elDiario.es here.
Politics:
From The Guardian here: ‘The president and the penthouse: how Madrid’s government spent €6.3m on a temporary ‘office’. The saga surrounding the purchase for the outspoken right-wing regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso refuses to go away’.
Ceuta and Melilla:
From El País in English here: ‘Ceuta, the month that broke a city. Hostility toward migrants is increasing among local residents who are fed up and feel abandoned by the central government. In a city that prides itself on religious coexistence, conflicts have already flared up between its Muslim and Christian communities’.
Ceuta: some of the five thousand migrants (or more) still in Ceuta come originally from Black Africa – and are not Morocco’s responsibility. Others are minors who must be protected under Spanish and European law. The remainder…? It depends who you ask, but they must be dealt with on an individual basis (thanks, says CNN here, to the Supreme Court ruling) – and quickly as the Ceuta issue is encouraging the right and far-right to stir the pot. From elDiario.es here: ‘Ceuta, a snapshot of a month of chaos: “It was a miscalculation to consider it resolved when 70,000 people returned to Morocco.” “We thought that if so many had returned in two days, it would be all over in a week.” elDiario.es reconstructs the details and key dates of the management of a crisis that erupted on July 30, is now worsening with outbreaks of violence, and has cornered Sánchez's government due to its own mistakes and the offensive launched by the PP and Vox parties’.
‘Spain announces €165m emergency package for Ceuta as migrant returns continue’. Item from Euro News. ‘The Council of Ministers will on Tuesday approve an emergency package to revive the economy and strengthen public services in Ceuta, one month after the mass arrival of migrants’.
From The Olive Press here: ‘Spain prepares raft of new asylum and immigration laws to speed up deportations after Ceuta migrant crisis’.
NBC News has: ‘Spanish PM blames Russia, Israel for disinformation in Ceuta migrant crisis. Pedro Sánchez said it was clear that the two countries had used the crisis to criticize Madrid because of dissatisfaction with its position on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza’. Oddly, as confirmed by El País here: ‘Sánchez exonerates Morocco for the Ceuta crisis and announces that the King will visit the enclave for the first time with this government’.
‘‘We want to find a better future’: teenage girls on why they risked their lives to reach Spain’ with The Guardian reporting here.
From El Plural here: ‘Racism in Ceuta begins on social media: hate messages tripled at the start of the crisis. The FARO system (a Government-run social media hate analysis system) detected 9,590 comments against the foreign population on July 30 and 31 alone’.
From Público here: ‘Far-right extremists from Portugal, Switzerland, and France travelled to Spain to incite hatred in Ceuta: "Anger is growing in Europe." Activists from neo-Nazi and neo-fascist organizations in Germany and Italy, with connections to Spanish groups, are calling for "toughened borders" and launching new xenophobic campaigns. The Save Europe Act platform, with activists in various countries and supported in Spain by Vox leaders, is preparing new demonstrations in Barcelona and Madrid to demand "remigration."’.
Zero Hedge (a far-right page from the USA) has a lopsided view of Ceuta, managing to quote bile from Inevitable West (Elon Musk), Vito Quiles, Visegrád 24, Javier Negre and even Tommy Robinson in an article titled ‘Uprising In Ceuta: Locals Have Had Enough Of Migrant Invasion’. It seems that ‘the invaders’, when not ‘eating local cats and birds’, are busy ‘dragging girls into the mountains for gang-rapes’.
Health:
‘Heat waves leave more than 5,200 dead this summer, a record high in Spain: "They are a growing threat to health"’, says 20Minutos here.
From Maldita here: ‘Fake doctors on YouTube: over 1,000 AI-powered channels and how the platform allows nearly 100,000 videos in 30 languages’.
American versus Spanish chicken, an article from Gamin Traveler here.
Crime and Punishment:
An amusing story here from Público: ‘Antifascists 'kick' Aliança Catalana out of a local festival in Barcelona by tossing a large packet of salt into their paella’. The photo says it all.
Media:
In his own way, PP deputy Rafael Hernando has long been a thorn in the side of the PSOE. Last week he posted a bulo about Pedro Sanchez and his wife enjoying a holiday in Andorra. The photo is dated August 31st 2024: "From the beach to the mountains. People are suffering in Ceuta from the Moroccan invasion and hybrid warfare against our sovereignty and our border, and Sánchez takes a helicopter and a Falcon jet to go cycling in Andorra. No scruples, no shame." The post was picked up by Canal Sur (Andalusian TV) which merrily ran it on their news broadcast.
elDiario.es says: ‘The TVE News Council condemns Vox's "harassment" of its journalists: "Now they're calling us terrorists". The Consejo de Informativos de TVE condemns the statements made by Rocío de Meer, Vox's national deputy for Almería, for "harassment and targeting." The politician reacted to a photo from Ceuta on the program 'La hora de La 1' with: "Not all terrorists plant bombs, some are journalists."
‘The economist Julen Bollain has perfectly captured the essence of Vox. "It's gaining support among the unemployed and workers, but what does it propose for them?" he asks in a post that has garnered thousands of retweets. "Eliminate the minimum wage. Cut unemployment benefits. Lower severance pay...", the message continues. The community is clear: a worker who supports the far-right party (known in Spain as ‘un fachapobre’) has "less common sense than an amoeba..."’. From Público here.
Ecology:
From Euronews here: ‘Is Spain facing another major earthquake? A geologist tells Euronews about the risks’.
Thousands of raccoons are invading the mountains of Mallorca: “When they’re small, they’re cute, but then people stop liking them.” Experts estimate that the population of this species is increasing at a faster rate than the number of captures. 767 raccoons were ‘euthanized’ (lovely word) in 2025 and another 438 by the end of July 2026’.
…...
Various:
From Sur in English here: ‘The Ministry of Justice reverses its decision and grants citizenship to Benahavís councillor: ‘Common sense has prevailed’. Scott Marshall, who was born and has lived all his life in the province, welcomes the court’s ruling "with relief" following a lengthy legal process’.
‘Spain break 23-year-old international cricket record’, says the Times of India here.
El Mundo has: ‘Three masked men steal the Villena Treasure in four minutes, one of the most valuable Bronze Age collections in Europe. The collection of goldwork, dating back to around 1000 BC, is mainly composed of gold pieces and is on display at the Muvi, the archaeological museum of Villena (Alicante), without permanent security personnel’.
From Diario Sur here: ‘The National Police's charity race returns to Málaga to combat loneliness. The event will take place on September 11th, and the proceeds will go to the Telephone of Hope, which has received nearly 9,000 calls this year’.
See Spain:
From POD Travels here: Twenty-one places to see in Northern Spain’. It assures the reader that ‘There are some incredible places to see in Northern Spain, largely untouched by tourism like its southern counterpart. We’ve embarked on road trips to the Cantabria, Asturias and Aragon regions – the scenery is spectacular…’
Finally:
Canción de septiembre with Ana Belén and Miguel Ríos on YouTube here.
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