☔️ Spain is drowning. Literally
Also: Spain gets a bad corruption grade...and sharks!
Madrid | Issue #136
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Wet enough for ya?
🌧️ In Spain, the rain falls mainly… f’ing everywhere!
Rain, rain, go away. Leonardo, Marta…we never invited you, nor did we invite your friends who showed up earlier — you know, Francis, Goretti, Harry, Ingrid, Joseph and Kristin.
Seriously, enough. The only thing more demoralizing than living through January — the rainiest in 25 years, they say, after the contributions of the six alphabetically named storms Frances through Kristin dumped an average of 119.3 liters on each and every square meter of Spain — was the first week of February, when Leo and Marta poured about 20% more than in the previous week.
For those wondering why we’re talking about the weather instead of something “important,” we’d like to remind you that weather is the original safe space.
Research suggests Brits spend about two days a year — more than four months over a lifetime — talking about it. And it’s been called “conversation’s last refuge,” because it’s the only thing we can still half-agree on. Of course, we’re not British. But after this much rain, we emotionally qualify for citizenship.
But how crazy is it? Let’s visit Grazalema, a “Pueblo Blanco” in the hills north of Cádiz. There, over the last three weeks, some 2,000 liters fell per square meter — more than a year’s worth of rain, or what meteorologist Nahel Belgherze called on X “hydrologically absurd.”
That causes…problems. Grazalema’s approximately 2,000 residents were evacuated during Leonardo due to fears that the ground was unstable. “This situation is completely abnormal,” said Juanma Moreno, president of Andalucía’s regional government. “The ground is literally spewing water."
And that’s only one part of the 11,000 people who had to leave their homes over the risks of floods and mud slides. On Sunday, flooding forced the closing of some 179 highways, mostly in Andalucía, according to the DGT traffic authority, as well as local and long-distance trains. And, in the biggest news (kidding), one La Liga fútbol game was postponed ⚽.
Deaths have been reported. Five have died in Spain and Portugal, according to reports. (The precipitation is not just rain: one victim was a snowplow driver who plunged down a slope in a mountain pass.)
There is good news, though, right? Indeed, there is. Spain, as you know (right?), often struggles with drought conditions. Just a few years ago, a church tower re-emerged from a rapidly depleting reservoir in Catalonia, where boats had to remove fish from oxygen-starved waters to protect drinking supplies.
Now there’s water aplenty. Over the last two weeks, the rains added more than 10,000 cubic hectometers (a.k.a. a lot) to Spain’s reservoirs, breaking 30-year-old records, according to the Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen.
Just look at this graph. With 43,341 hm3, Spain’s reservoirs are now more than 77% full, about 24 percentage points higher than the 10-year average, according to our fave site Embalses.net. Many dams have had to dump overflow water for the first time in decades. (Only Murcia — poor Murcia — is still super dry.)
Amen. “The main implication is that the recurring sword of Damocles of drought has been postponed for months and even more than a year if it doesn’t rain anymore,” Javier Martín-Vide, emeritus professor of physical geography at the University of Barcelona, told ABC.
On the political front. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez promised aid for distressed farmers who’ve suffered massive crop damage, which his government can do; he’s also called for all political parties to join together to create a national climate change pact, which, considering he doesn’t have the votes to pass basically anything, his government cannot do.
Want more rain? You may be in luck: Storm Nils has arrived.
More news below. 👇👇
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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties
1. 🗳️ Vox surges in Aragón as Extremadura heads toward political deadlock
Tough to swallow. Aragón just delivered an election result that feels like deja vu all over again: the center-right Partido Popular (PP) came first in regional polls, but not nearly far enough to govern alone.
Incumbent regional president Jorge Azcón won the election, but actually slipped slightly compared to 2023 (from around 35% to 34%), leaving the PP well short of a majority. In other words, the right won big… just not the PP.
The real winner is Vox. The far-right party surged from 11% to 18% of the vote, doubling its seats from 7 to 14 and turning itself into the unavoidable kingmaker.
Vox boss Santiago Abascal not only campaigned; he basically treated Aragón like a national battleground, and voters responded with what Vox called “more than double the Vox.”
The big loser was the center-left PSOE. The socialists, led by Pilar Alegría, dropped hard, falling from 30% to 24% and losing five seats. It’s one of the party’s worst results in the region’s democratic history, and it confirms a broader pattern: Aragón, like Extremadura before it, is drifting rightward.
That drift. Since 2023, the combined right-wing bloc has jumped from 47% to 55% of the vote, the strongest conservative showing in decades.
So why did Vox do so well? Part of it is simple voter migration: polls suggest the PSOE lost about 16% of its 2023 voters to the PP or Vox, and the PP itself bled around 10% of its support directly to Vox. Plus, the youths like Vox. 🤷
Vox also pulled in new voters who didn’t participate last time. And they’ve been tapping into very specific anger in Aragón: frustration in the farming sector over the Mercosur trade deal from Brussels, immigration, and the general sense that rural Spain is being ignored.
So what happens now? Well… The PP has almost no path forward without Vox. There is no viable center-left coalition.
That leaves Azcón dependent on Vox (and Vox knows it). Abascal has already signaled he will demand a high price this time: real power. He wants leadership of several ministries and further right policies on immigration, climate, and public spending.
That’s not all. After recent elections in Extremadura, the PP and Vox are locked in a standoff that could end with voters being sent back to the polls.
The PP won the elections last December, and María Guardiola (the current regional leader) is the candidate again, but she doesn’t have the numbers to govern alone. Vox’s support is essential (shocker), and Abascal’s party is refusing to simply abstain or back her from outside the government.
The investiture vote is set for March 3, and negotiations have gone nowhere, with both sides now fighting publicly as much as privately. If Guardiola fails the first investiture vote, the region enters a two-month countdown before new elections.
Fun times ahead. 🎉
2. 📉 Spain slips down the global corruption rankings (not a great look, people)
Oh, the humanity! According to Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), Spain dropped three places in the global classification this year, landing at 49 out of 182 countries, with a score of 55/100.
That puts Spain in the same bracket as Cyprus and Fiji, just above Italy, and below countries like Saudi Arabia and Rwanda.
FYI, The CPI is the world’s most widely cited corruption benchmark. It doesn’t measure corruption directly, but rather perceptions of corruption in the public sector, using data from institutions like the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.
So what’s the tea driving the decline? Transparency International points to a familiar mix: weak political consensus on reforms (no surprise there), insufficient transparency in public procurement (naughty!), and a string of high-profile scandals that have dominated headlines.
We don’t talk about Koldo. The past year has been marked by turmoil inside the governing PSOE party, including the imprisonment of former party organization secretary Santos Cerdán, and the jailing of ex-minister José Luis Ábalos and his former adviser Koldo García.
Spain did launch a 15-measure anti-corruption plan in July, and even though Transparency International called it an “important step”, it also warned it was ultimately limited and insufficient without deeper structural change.
Those were the days. The last time Spain actually improved its CPI score was in 2019. Since then, it’s been a slow downward drift, suggesting that without a long-term, cross-party national anti-corruption strategy — not just emergency plans after scandals — we may keep sliding.
We’re not the only ones. Spain’s slide is part of a broader European problem. The report warns that most EU member states are stagnating or declining, with accountability mechanisms weakening across the bloc 🫠.
Spain itself fell from 16th to 17th within the EU, as countries like Portugal and Slovenia edge ahead.
3. 🏘️ Are tourist apartments really going away?
Now maybe we’ll find out if eliminating tourist apartments brings down the rent for the rest of us.
New data from Spain’s statistics agency, the INE, suggests we’re running that experiment in real time. According to its latest (and still “experimental”) data series, the number of tourist apartments marketed on platforms fell 12.4% year-on-year in November 2025, to 329,764 units — a drop of nearly 47,000 homes.
Big tumble. It’s the biggest annual decline since the agency began tracking the data in 2020, and the lowest number of tourist flats recorded in almost three years. As a share of the total housing stock, tourist apartments now represent 1.24%, down from 1.41% a year earlier.
Cue ministerial chest-thumping. Pablo Bustinduy, Spain’s Minister of Consumer Affairs and a member of the pretty-far left Sumar, called the drop “proof that regulation and intervention work,” adding that it was “absolutely inconceivable” to allow “an activity of this magnitude and scale to develop under illegal conditions.”
You pay now. Bustinduy reminded reporters that his ministry forced Airbnb to remove 65,000 listings — “We won in court on several occasions. Those advertisements have been removed” — and slapped the platform with a €64 million fine.
The PSOE narrative. The Housing Ministry, led by Isabel Rodríguez of the socialists, also sacó pecho, tying the decline to the new mandatory short-term rental registry and the reform of Spain’s Horizontal Property Law, which since April has allowed homeowners’ associations to veto tourist rentals with a three-fifths majority.
Who posted the biggest drops? Valencia (-25%), Madrid (-26%), Galicia (-22.5%), and the Balearics (-19.8%). Murcia saw one of the steepest percentage falls. But not everywhere is retreating: Andalucía, the region with the most tourist flats (91,757), actually rose 1.2%, with Málaga still leading nationally in absolute numbers. And when you look at tourist apartments as a share of total housing, Las Palmas (4.96%) and Málaga (4.84%) top the ranking.
So…case closed? Not quite. The INE data is experimental and based on scraping listings from major platforms — which means what’s counted depends on what’s posted. More than 86,000 short-term rentals have been flagged as illegal under the new registry.
Meanwhile, tenant groups warn that illegal listings remain widespread, and that many owners are simply shifting into the regulatory “black hole” of seasonal rentals — 11-month contracts — as well as room-by-room lets, to dodge controls.
And rules beget creativity. As we reported last week, in Barcelona, groups of enterprising “tenants” are quietly remodeling apartments to add bedrooms and then renting them out as €150-a-night luxury suites.
This all leaves an uncomfortable question. Even if every tourist flat vanished overnight, would it fix Spain’s housing crisis? Or do we just have too many people chasing too few homes — and need to build lots more?
4. 🏝️ The tragic—and then wonderful—story of the bars of Port de la Selva
This story has a little bit of everything. Summer sunshine, small-town gossip, a business boom, a sudden tragedy… and then, unexpectedly, a kind of civic group hug.
It started last summer, when Port de la Selva — a whitewashed fishing town on the Costa Brava, tucked under Cap de Creus — woke up to a nightmare scenario for any place that lives off tourism: around 10 bars, chiringuitos, and restaurants went dark more or less at once.
Terraces empty, doors locked. In a town of roughly 1,000 residents, it wasn’t just a few venues. It was about one-fifth of the local hospitality scene, much of it right on the seafront, including the iconic Cafè de la Marina, famous from the Josep Maria de Sagarra play of the same name.
The reason was grim. The couple behind the mini-empire, José Andrés Bel (“Pepito”), 71, and Adela Esteban, 68, died by suicide weeks apart in the summer of 2025, amid mounting financial distress. “They had millions in debt, unpaid loans, and the workers hadn’t received their last paycheck,” a longtime resident told ARA.
Bel wasn’t some stereotypical beach-bar operator. He was an economist and former executive with a glossy CV — senior roles at Stradivarius, Misako and Castañer — who, after decades summering in the town, decided in retirement to go big.
Starting around 2018, the couple took over a string of establishments, often paying landlords double the previous rent and keeping places open deeper into the winter than Port de la Selva was used to.
For a while, it worked — and the town benefited from the extra life. But by 2024, some of Bel’s roughly 20 investors, worried by his heavy spending, began to pull back. El Español reported that by June 2025, Adela was seeking a €150,000 short-term loan backed by 51% of the business.
After their suicide, their company was left with heavy debts, and the town with about 100 seasonal workers suddenly unemployed and a seaside promenade lined with shuttered businesses at the height of tourist season.
And here’s where the story flips from tragedy to something else. In the months that followed, the town essentially refused to let the place go quiet.
A Girona-based investor (reportedly of the 51% guarantee) took control of the company and signaled he wanted to reopen. One landlord decided to open his own restaurant in the property he had rented to Bel, and a series of local entrepreneurs started stepping in to reopen others — partly as a business opportunity, partly as a community rescue mission.
By Semana Santa, most of the shuttered bars will be back in business.
“A tragedy can become an opportunity,” Mayor Lídia Ferrer told El País.
5. 🦈 Spain’s Mediterranean has a Jaws moment
Wait! Cue this soundtrack before reading this (trust us, it’s for dramatic effect).
Yes, it’s true. Sharks, including the great white, are showing up again in the Spanish Mediterranean waters. However, before anyone starts reenacting Jaws on the beaches of Alicante, take a deep breath.
The latest headline comes from Ibiza, where on Monday people filmed a large shark swimming inside the port — a rare sight that instantly triggered alarm and a lot of vertical smartphone videos.
Before that, there was a confirmed case in April 2023, when a juvenile great white shark (just over two meters long) was accidentally caught about 11 nautical miles off the coast between Dénia and Jávea, near Cabo de San Antonio.
This week, the Spanish researchers from the Institute of Oceanography and the University of Cádiz who documented the capture published the finding in a scientific journal — making it one of the very few verified great white sightings in Spain in recent decades.
The previous confirmed encounters were in 2018 near Cabrera (Balearic Islands) and 2015 near Tarifa, also during tuna fishing season.
So why is this happening?! Experts say the great white has always had a persistent but extremely rare presence in the Spanish Mediterranean. So it’s not that sharks are suddenly “invading,” it’s that monitoring has improved and occasional encounters are being documented more carefully. Phew.
Another factor is food. Yup, more human bathers. Sorry. No. Rather, these sightings often coincide with the seasonal migration of Atlantic bluefin tuna, one of the shark’s key prey. Where tuna goes, top predators follow. Scientists also point out that sharks can be drawn closer to coastal areas by human activity (okay, so it's true), including fishing waste near ports.
The phrase “great white shark” automatically activates the scary John Williams theme, but the reality is far less dramatic: In over 160 years of records in Spanish waters, documented run-ins with humans have been exceptionally rare.
In fact, great whites in the Mediterranean are considered vulnerable, and populations have declined sharply — with some estimates suggesting a drop of over 70% around the Balearics in recent decades.
So you can swim; just don’t pet them. The Mediterranean is a living ecosystem, and sharks popping up is not a reason to cancel your summer plans. The real story here is that one of its most iconic predators is still hanging on.
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