🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

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Is this any way to run a housing market? (Or is it even a market?)

"Todos somos Maricarmen.” The shouty housing debate of recent weeks has focused on evictions — and the tale of Maricarmen, the 87-year-old who died days after enduring one.

That's understandable. But it also masks a deeper argument between two very distinct views of what property is and how it should be used. And the solution to Spain's current housing crisis — and it is a crisis — is very different, if not diametrically opposed, depending on which view you subscribe to.

Worse, if you split the difference between the two housing theories — as Spain has done so far — it only gets worse.

So what are the views? El País laid out the two sides well in an article this week, as a disagreement between two political views represented by José García Montalvo, an economics professor at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and Javier Gil, a sociologist at the CSIC, Spain's public scientific research body.

García Montalvo’s view is essentially a supply argument. Rents are high because there aren’t enough homes — specifically, enough public housing — and small landlords are filling the gap the state left. They charge market rates not out of malice but because the market allows it.

Gil starts from a different premise entirely. He’s less interested in supply-and-demand mechanics than in what the landlord-tenant relationship actually does in society: it transfers wealth from people who don’t own property to people who do. Even a well-meaning landlord with a single inherited flat is participating in a system that makes some people richer at the expense of others’ stability.

Underneath all of this is a more fundamental clash — is housing an asset, or isn’t it? Where you stand on that defines what you do to fix the problem.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

El Mundo political journalist Juanma Lamet joins Adrián Bono to discuss Pedro Sánchez’s prospects, Spain’s divided left and what a Feijóo–Vox governing alliance could mean for the country.

We explore why Vox is shaping the political conversation, how divisions between PSOE’s potential allies like Frente Amplio and Podemos could affect parliamentary seats, and why affordable housing matters to the future of Spanish democracy.

We also turn to Ceuta and Spain’s relationship with Morocco.

In this episode:

• Spain’s next government: PP, Vox and Alberto Núñez Feijóo

• Pedro Sánchez, PSOE and the fragmented Spanish left

• Housing, immigration and the rise of the far right

• Ceuta, Melilla and Spain–Morocco relations

• The EU’s role at Spain’s southern border

Juanma Lamet is a political journalist at El Mundo, where he focuses on the Partido Popular, and a regular commentator on Spanish television and radio.

Created in collaboration with A13 Content.

Editor’s note: This interview was recorded a few days before Pedro Sánchez unexpectedly announced Spain’s snap general election. Lamet’s analysis remains relevant to the campaign, but his comments reflect the information available at the time of recording.

Who do you think will win Spain’s next election? Can Pedro Sánchez secure enough seats to govern alone, or will he need coalition partners? Tell us your prediction below 👇

🇪🇸 The Bubble is Spain's #1 English-language, bestselling newsletter.

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And I have great news: it’s a long weekend! Of course, if you work remotely and your office is in, I don’t know, Kisangani (a real place!), then I guess it makes no difference to you.

• There are so many things happening this long weekend. Mainly, we’re celebrating that Latin Americans are bringing all their wealth here Hispanic heritage, and the fact that everyone speaks Spanish there by some weird providential coincidence and not because we went, we saw, we conquered.

• So let’s all celebrate that many centuries ago, for a fleeting moment, we were the strongest and most influential country in the world (until King Philip II lost it all in some bad crypto investments or something).

Happy long weekend!

1. 🇪🇸 Fighter jets, tanks, and the King in military regalia: No, it’s not a coup… It’s Spain’s biggest parade!

Remember those fighter jets you’ve been hearing in the sky lately? The ones that made you grab your go-bag, cry, and suddenly think about how much you love your parents? That’s right, it wasn’t the Russians (or Trump)! It was just the Air Force pilots rehearsing for Spain’s biggest celebration of the year, the National Day Parade.

• Look, if you come from abroad, this may be difficult to swallow, but Oct. 12 is a big freaking deal here. Spain’s National Day, also known as Día de la Hispanidad, is the equivalent of France’s Bastille Day, or July 4th in the US.

• It’s the day we commemorate Christopher Columbus’s (aka Cristobal Colón) arrival in the Americas in 1492, an event that marked the beginning of Spain’s expansion across the Atlantic, so we celebrate the historical and cultural ties between our country and the Spanish-speaking world. We also don’t talk about the rest. Conquistadors and the indigenous peoples became friends, had a great time, and that’s all there is to it. End of story. Hurray, us!

• Anyway, every year there are thousands of soldiers on the streets — along with armored vehicles and fighter jets in the sky, some fireworks, and King Felipe VI (aka F6). It’s a pretty cool parade happening in the heart of Madrid.

And so, on Monday (a holiday in Spain, obvi), the Armed Forces will take over Paseo del Prado and Paseo de Recoletos for the country’s biggest annual military parade.

• Look up! The festivities kick off at 11 a.m. with the arrival of the King and Queen Letizia, followed by military honors, a spectacular parachute jump, the raising of the Spanish flag, and a tribute to fallen service members. Then comes the fun part: the aerial parade, featuring military aircraft flying over central Madrid. It’s just like Top Gun but less gay.

• And look down! Once the planes have done their thing, the ground parade begins. There will be soldiers from different branches of Spain’s Armed Forces, members of the Guardia Civil and National Police, military vehicles, and plenty of uniforms.

• Where’s the action? The parade starts at the Glorieta del Emperador Carlos V (near Atocha), travels north along Paseo del Prado and Paseo de Recoletos, and finishes at Plaza de Colón. That’s a pretty spectacular stretch of Madrid, although you should expect huge crowds, security barriers, and road closures throughout the area.

Our advice? Get there early, find yourself a good spot along the route, and remember to look up. If military parades aren’t your thing,

🇪🇸 What: Spain’s National Day Military Parade

📍 Where: Paseo del Prado and Paseo de Recoletos, from Atocha to Plaza de Colón, Madrid

📅 When: Oct. 12, starting at 11 a.m.

🎟️ Tickets: Free!

2. 🎉 But wait, there’s more: Four days, 150 events, and a whole lot of Hispanidad!

Turns out Monday’s military parade is just the cherry on top. We still haven’t mentioned what’s below the cherry!

You see, Madrid is wrapping up its annual Hispanidad festival with free concerts, flamenco, Mexican food, jazz, and a Colombian pop superstar, all of this in order to apologize for the sins committed during the conquest celebrate the Spanish language.

Lest you forget, more than 600 million people worldwide speak Spanish, and Madrid wants to celebrate that fact. The festival features more than 150 activities across the region, so take note.

Here’s what to put on your calendar:

Friday: Start exploring, just like Chris Columbus did (the explorer, not the film director)!

• The festival isn’t just about concerts. Cultural venues across Madrid, including Teatros del Canal, Alcalá 31, and the Casa Museo de Lope de Vega, are participating with theater, exhibitions, and events celebrating Hispanic history and culture.

• There’s also a special focus on the U.S., this year’s guest country, with programming exploring the historical connections between Spain and the US.

Saturday: Sebastián Yatra takes over Madrid

• The Colombian superstar headlines the festival with a free concert at Plaza de España. Join thousands of people singing Tacones Rojos, Vagabundo, Traicionera (songs I don’t personally know but I hear are pretty kewl). This is probably the weekend’s biggest musical attraction, so don’t arrive five minutes before the show.

Sunday: Marta Sánchez celebrates 40 years of pop!

• One of Spain’s biggest pop divas takes over Plaza de España for another free concert, celebrating four decades in the music business. Her playlist is basically a crash course in Spanish pop history. And yes, you’ll probably hear Desesperada.

Monday: Happy National Day!

• The festival concludes on Día de la Hispanidad, with celebrations across the capital. Besides the military parade (see above), check the festival’s final-day program for additional concerts, exhibitions, and cultural activities.

And there’s more than enough to keep you busy between concerts. Madrid’s municipal markets, including Barceló, La Cebada, Antón Martín, and San Isidro, are joining the celebrations with food tastings, live music, and folkloric performances.

• Meanwhile, the festival’s broader program includes Mexican gastronomy at Ágave y Maíz, jazz, Afro-Cuban funk, flamenco, and plenty of Latin American music. Check the official schedule before heading out.

Our advice? Yatra on Saturday, Marta Sánchez on Sunday, and a little food and culture in between.

🎉 What: Hispanidad 2026

📍 Where: Plaza de España and multiple venues across Madrid and the region

📅 When: Oct. 9-12

🎟️ Tickets: Free for both headline concerts.

3. 🎨 What do flamenco, colonialism, and an Argentine beer have in common?

Quite a lot, apparently. And a new exhibition in Madrid is here to explain why.

Continentes como semillas (Continents Like Seeds) brings together three artists: Argentina’s La Chola Poblete and Spain’s Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero, to explore how centuries of colonialism (kinda topical this weekend) continue to shape our identities, traditions, and even the objects we consider part of our national cultures. Sounds a little academic? Bear with us. There’s some genuinely fascinating history here. Here’s what you’ll discover:

• Flamenco has traveled more than you think. Experimental flamenco singer Niño de Elche and artist Pedro G. Romero trace the surprising connections between Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Samoa. Their work follows the colonial trade routes of the Manila Galleons, which connected Asia, the Americas, and Europe for more than 200 years. Expect music, sound installations, and some unexpected cultural connections.

• Meet La Chola Poblete. The Argentine artist explores how colonialism, religion, capitalism, and gender have shaped Latin American identities. Her drawings bring together the Virgin Mary, Pachamama (the Andean earth deity), Che Guevara, trans identities, and even the logo of Quilmes beer (Argentina’s Budweiser). It’s a provocative mix of sacred imagery, popular culture, and political commentary.

• Art that doesn’t give you easy answers. Through sculpture, drawings, sound, and performance, the exhibition challenges our assumptions about cultural ownership. Who gets to claim a tradition as their own? What happens when something travels across continents and becomes part of another culture? And how much of what we call Spanish actually came from somewhere else?

Our favorite part? The exhibition is also about how people adapted, resisted, and reinvented the cultures they inherited. And if you’ve ever wondered how a Chinese shawl became a flamenco essential, well, now you’ve got a reason to visit.

🎨 What: Continentes como semillas

📍 Where: La Casa Encendida, Ronda de Valencia 2, Madrid

📅 When: Check website for exhibition dates and opening hours

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission

4. 🎉 Fiestas de El Pilar: Free concerts, fireworks, and five days of partying in a neighborhood you’ve never been to

Grab your map, people! We’re going on an adventure to… El Pilar! For those of you who suck at exploring (unlike Chris Columbus), El Pilar is a neighborhood in northern Madrid (close to IE University), and this weekend it’s celebrating its annual neighborhood festival with free concerts, DJs, carnival rides, and probably alcohol, but you didn’t hear that from us.

Most of the action takes place around Parque de la Vaguada (look it up!), and the lineup is pretty impressive for a neighborhood party.

Here’s what’s happening this weekend:

• Friday: Spanish pop-rock band Despistaos (you don’t know them) performs at 10 p.m., followed by DJ Nano (you also don’t know him) at 11:45 p.m. Perfect if you’re in the mood for a Friday night out.

• Saturday: It’s Children’s Day, with circus shows, climbing walls, go-karts, and games. At night, there’s an Extremoduro (yup, you also don’t know them) tribute at 9 p.m. and Demarco Flamenco at 11:30 p.m. Skip this one if you hate children.

• Sunday: The festival’s Noche Joven brings Soge Culebra (10 p.m.) and Hermanos Martínez (11:15 p.m.), followed by a DJ session. Honestly, I don’t know any of these people.

• Monday: Celebrate Spain’s National Day with Latin American music and dance from 11:30 a.m., catch Tamara and Francisco at 8 p.m., and enjoy the fireworks finale at 10 p.m. in Parque de la Alcazaba. Well… great.

Our advice? Come for the food, stay for the neighborhood atmosphere, and don’t miss Monday’s fireworks!

🎉 What: Fiestas del Barrio del Pilar 2026

📍 Where: Parque de la Vaguada and surrounding venues, Madrid

📅 When: Oct. 8–12

🎟️ Tickets: Free concerts and main festivities

5. 🎭 Verborrea: Punk rebellion meets Madrid’s housing market.

What happens when punk rockers grow old? That’s the premise of Verborrea, a new play making its premiere at Madrid’s Nave 10 Matadero (as the spawn of former rock singers myself, I know the answer to that question and trust me, that wasn’t my experience).

• Written and directed by acclaimed Spanish playwright Pablo Remón, the production stars Javier Cámara (one of Spain’s best actors), Israel Elejalde, Marta Nieto, and Emilio Tomé, and takes us back to the glory days of a fictional 1980s punk band whose surviving members haven’t exactly aged gracefully.

• Segismundo Tóxico, the band’s former singer, now lives in a rundown house in the mountains north of Madrid. He makes ends meet selling badges outside Taylor Swift concerts and dealing small amounts of drugs.

• Meanwhile, his family wants him out so they can renovate the property and turn it into an Airbnb (in this political climate? That’s adventurous).

Beneath the humor, Verborrea explores something more universal: growing older and watching your dreams slip away.

Our advice? If you enjoy sharp Spanish theater with dark humor and a little social commentary, this one’s worth checking out.

🎭 What: Verborrea

📍 Where: Nave 10 Matadero, Paseo de la Chopera 14, Madrid

📅 When: Through Nov. 1 (Tuesday–Sunday)

🎟️ Tickets: €15.75

📺 What to watch if you don’t want to leave the couch this weekend…

📺 TV Series: The Castle (El Castillo) | 2026

📍Where to watch: Movistar+

❓What’s it about: Liesa is a young inspector working for Spain’s police unit specializing in immigration and human trafficking. With his partner, he begins investigating suspicious changes in brothels across Spain. They soon uncover a network run by a criminal group involved in the sexual exploitation of foreign women.

🤩 Why you should watch: Because it takes a disturbing look at Spain's sex trafficking industry through the eyes of a Colombian woman trapped in prostitution, a ruthless pimp, and a police inspector trying to bring down the operation. Starring Raúl Arévalo and Omar Ayuso, it's been praised as one of the year's best Spanish series, particularly for its almost documentary-like realism and its refusal to sensationalize violence or sexual exploitation.

💬 English Subtitles: No.

💃🏻 Places to try this weekend…

☕ Copenhagen, New York, Madrid: La Cabra has arrived!

What’s it about? La Cabra is the Danish specialty coffee brand that’s made a name for itself in Copenhagen, New York, and beyond, and is opening its first Madrid location today right in the heart of Chueca.

Why you should go: Because La Cabra takes its beans seriously, offering everything from expertly prepared espresso drinks to seasonal coffees brewed by hand.

Bottom line: Madrid's specialty coffee scene just got another international heavyweight.

📍 Address: Calle de las Infantas 25, Madrid

🍳 Caja de Huevos: Madrid's new restaurant is putting all its eggs in one basket

What’s it about: Remember Caja de Cerillas, the Chamberí restaurant that's become one of Madrid's hardest tables to book? Well, its creator, Enrique Valentí, has opened a new spot in Chueca, and this time he's putting eggs at the center of everything.

Why you should go: Because the menu features six variations, including eggs with Iberian ham, chistorra sausage, eggplant and tomato, and even a carbonara-inspired version with guanciale and pecorino. Feeling extravagant? There's also lobster or imperial caviar. Prices range from €18 to €100, depending on how fancy you're feeling.

Bottom line: Come hungry, bring someone to share with, and prepare to reconsider everything you thought you knew about fried eggs.

Address: Calle del Pelayo, 35, Madrid

👨🏻‍💻 Viral Videos of the Week

🤴🏻King Felipe VI tries to speak Finnish while Queen Letizia judges his performance in silence

🌧️ The rain in Spain can ruin your trip… or not!

🔔 Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!

If you’re not following us on Instagram yet, you’re missing out. We’re posting exclusive content with our collaborators across Spain, breaking news updates, and pop culture coverage. Click on the post above and come hang with us!

🙏 Once again, please remember to share this newsletter with your friends on social media. The more we grow, the more information we’ll be able to offer each week.

(In a solemn note before today’s newsletter: Last night, María Carmen Abascal — aka Maricarmen, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction set off the current battle over Spain's housing crisis, died last night. Our condolences to Maricarmen’s family. We hope they’re given the privacy and space they need to grieve after so much public attention.)

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🗳️ Spain was already plunging into elections and a general strike. Then Maricarmen died.

Spain's going to the polls. Honestly, there's nothing like voting (especially if, like one of us, you've just become a Spanish citizen). So we'd like to send out a big Thank You 🤗 to Pedro Sánchez for admitting his majority-free government had no future and calling snap parliamentary elections. ¡Gracias, Mr. Handsome!

• The 411. Just after 9 a.m. on Monday (because who really starts on time in Spain), Sánchez stepped up to a podium at Moncloa and told the country that, after the defeat of his two housing decrees last Friday, it was time to elect a new Parliament.

• His words. Sánchez said Spain needed to “secure a much broader progressive majority in Parliament” (unlikely, polls suggest), and added a dare: “You, the people of Spain, must decide what role you wish to play in it, and also what role you want Spain to play. You must choose whether to join that far-right wave—which causes regression wherever it governs—or whether you want Spain to remain a bastion of openness, social justice, and environmental responsibility.” Soaring rhetoric much?

What now? Well, Spain has 54 days to get its electoral act together. The official machinery kicks in this week, with the election decree published Tuesday and candidates due to register between Oct. 21 and 26. Then comes the fun part: the 15-day campaign starts Nov. 13, postal voting is already open, and on Nov. 29, everyone gets to decide who they want running the country.

• The campaigns in a nutshell 🥜. Sánchez will say that he is the only one who can save the world from a far-right apocalypse; PP boss Alberto Nuñez Feijóo will say Sánchez is a mafioso and a dictator, and Spain needs to return to its sensible roots; and the far right (Vox) will blame everything on Muslim migrants. (The far left — Sumar or whatever it’s to be called — will say whatever gets it attention. More on that in a minute.)

October surprise. That is, those were the expected campaign strategies before last night, when Maricarmen, the 87-year-old whose eviction from her Madrid apartment set off the current conflagration, died hours before signing a new lease that would have allowed her to return home.

• Reaction. People in the tent city set up in the Puerta del Sol to protest the housing crisis marched to Parliament to mark Maricarmen's death; Sánchez offered condolences to those, like him, who felt this was a loss of one of their own; Feijóo asked for respect for Maricarmen's death and asked political parties not to politicize it (good luck on that); Podemos leader Irene Montero called it a “murder”; and Vox said “they killed her” by using her for political ends and blamed Sánchez. So much for keeping an even keel.

'Big Front'. Talking about the far left, the many small parties to the left of Sánchez are looking to form a Frente Amplio (presentation date: Oct. 17) to not get clobbered in the elections, being that Sánchez's leftward turn has stolen many of their voters. Now they just have to pick a leader…

Trumpy claims. Not to be ignored, Madrid regional presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the PP told voters not to cast their ballots by mail because, you know, Sánchez could tamper with them. We've heard that from a certain 🍊 menace, no?

• Feijóo followed up later to cast some doubt on mail-in ballots, but in his usual milquetoast style.

• And a book! While Isabel’s been prepping fraud claims, she’s also been penning her memoirs; we’ll tell you when we know more, but for now we can say the cover is emo fab.

And elections were only declared 72 hours ago. It’s gonna be a long month and a half.

More news below. 👇👇

Are you an American living in Spain? You can vote in U.S. elections from here! If you’re an eligible U.S. citizen, request your ballot now at VoteFromAbroad.org and choose to receive it by email. Once it arrives, complete and return it promptly, following your state’s instructions and deadlines. Need help? The website offers state-by-state guidance and support from voter assistance volunteers. Request your ballot here.

🎙️ A new episode of The Bubble Podcast is out!

In this new episode, we discuss the Ceuta migration crisis; we have a one-on-one with journalist and writer David Jiménez and discuss weird Spanish obsessions. Subscribe and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🇪🇸 Carles Puigdemont can finally come home. But will he?

That only took nine years. Spain’s (lefty majority) Constitutional Court ordered the (majority righty) Supreme Court to apply PM Sánchez controversial Amnesty Law, which drops misuse-of-public-funds charges against those who led Catalonia’s failed independence referendum in 2017. That clears the way for former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont to return to Spain without being arrested.

• Wait… who? Puigdemont ran Catalonia during the referendum and subsequent declaration of independence (which amounted to nothing), then fled to Waterloo, Belgium, to avoid prosecution. He has lived there ever since, in a McMansion. Other separatist leaders stayed behind and eventually went to prison.

• Accidents of fate. He became one of Spain’s most powerful political players after inconclusive elections in 2023, when Sánchez needed support from Puigdemont’s seven Junts MPs to remain prime minister. In return, he promised an amnesty for Puigdemont and the other separatist leaders.

And that’s where things got messy. The Amnesty Law passed in 2024, but the Supreme Court refused to apply it to malversación — misuse of public funds — arguing that the separatist leaders had personally benefited from the spending.

• The Constitutional Court now says nope. In a 7–5 ruling, it said that interpretation was too restrictive and “contrary to the spirit and purpose” of a law that explicitly intended to cover public money spent pursuing Catalan independence (the idea is that it’s fine to misspend public money on a cause, but not on personal stuff, like a nice car). The Supreme Court subsequently lifted Puigdemont’s arrest warrant.

So when is Puigdemont coming back? Apparently not yet. His lawyer says they first want to make sure the Supreme Court has definitively closed the case. And then there’s the small matter of a general election on Nov. 29.

• Puigdemont will likely wait until after the election. His camp wants his return after nine years abroad to look like a political homecoming, not an electoral stunt. Plus, Junts is expected to have a rough election. Staying away lets current leader Míriam Nogueras take the blame.

• And don’t expect Sánchez-Puigdemont 2.0. Junts secretary-general Jordi Turull says supporting Sánchez again is “impossible” because the party “got burned” by their last agreement. Junts has also ruled out facilitating a PP-Vox government.

So… nobody’s getting their vote. Fun times.

2. 🏠 The housing decrees return — with a general strike!

Parliament voted down the housing laws, but that doesn’t mean they’re dead. On Tuesday, a day after PM Sánchez declared snap elections because his government’s housing decrees got shot down on the parliamentary floor, his government decreed two just-slightly-different versions. And it looks like at least one will pass.

• But wait, how? Because Spain has a thing called the Diputación Permanente — basically a rump Congress. When Parliament is dissolved for an election, it stays behind for a few essential jobs, including approving or rejecting government decrees. And unlike in Parliament, Sánchez has a majority in the Dippy.

The new decrees are mostly the old ones in slightly different outfits. The first brings back the shield against evictions of vulnerable people, extends expiring rental contracts, offers tax breaks to tenants and small landlords, and beefs up rules against turning ordinary homes into tourist or fake “seasonal” rentals. It also creates €10bn in zero-interest loans for first-time buyers, and adds €680mn in guarantees to boost construction.

Subtle tweak. In addition, it extends the restrictions on speculative home purchases by “vulture” funds to gran tenedores ˆ— basically, anyone who owns 10 or more properties (or five in “stressed” housing areas). Which could be uncomfortable for some of Sánchez’s ministers, who own some serious real estate themselves.

• The likely winner: The first decree. It has broader political support and is expected to get through the Diputación Permanente.

• The likely loser: The second decree, which would automatically extend rental contracts. The Basque national party doesn’t support it because, like, property owners don’t want tenants for life. So its passage is highly unlikely.

Will any of this calm Spain’s housing crisis? Probably not much.

• And people know it. In fact, the folks who have been camping out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, along with the unions, are already planning to make their feelings known — with a general strike on Nov. 11, the first backed by Spain’s two biggest unions, UGT and CCOO, in 14 years.

The strike is being organized around the housing crisis (obvs) and the demand for homes ordinary people can actually afford. It will also be held just 18 days before the Nov. 29 election and one day before the election campaign officially begins.

• The government says it respects the right to strike. The business groups say housing isn’t a labor issue — and don’t like making companies and workers pay for a protest aimed at the government. PP and Vox are unhappy, too (also obvs).

Apparently one political crisis at a time would be too easy. So Spain is getting an election, a housing crisis, two half-resurrected housing decrees and a general strike all at once! 🥳

3. ⚽ Lionel Messi bought a Spanish fútbol club. And another.

So much for sticking to what you know best. Former Barça superduperstar Lionel Messi has spent the little time he has off the pitch amassing a small empire of fútbol clubs. And this week he went BIG in Spain.

• The latest: On Oct. 1, a team in Spain’s second division — CD Eldense — announced that Messi would be its new owner, pending approval from Spain’s High Council for Sports. La pulga (The Flea, as the little fella is known) is buying 100% of the club, at a reported price of somewhere between €10 and €15 million, which is roughly what Messi earns in the time it takes you to read this article.

The club: Eldense was founded in 1921 in Elda, a 55,000-person city in Alicante province — by a group of Barcelona fans. Which is why, for 105 years, they’ve played in blaugrana, Barça’s blue and garnet colors. That detail, sources say, is what caught Messi’s eye.

• Not great…yet. Eldense’s best-ever league finish was seventh in Segunda — in 1963, waaay before Messi was born. They almost went bust in the late 2010s, clawed their way back to the second division in 2023, got relegated again, won promotion last season, and are currently sitting 17th of 22. It is, in other words, a project. Not a glamor acquisition.

• But the new owner already has people excited. After Eldense beat Real Oviedo 4-1 last Friday (after starting down 0-1), Messi posted a photo of himself watching the match — mate gourd in hand — captioned simply “Aupa Deportivo“ (“Let’s go, Deportivo”). A dozen new sponsors materialized within days. Wonder why? 🤔

But there’s more! The purchase reboots the rivalry between Messi and former Real Madrid megastar Cristiano Ronaldo, who, between them, won every Ballon d’Or from 2008 to 2017. Now they’ll face each other in the boardroom: Ronaldo holds a 25% stake in Almería, also in Segunda. Their clubs are due to meet on May 2, 2027. Almería beat Eldense 3-0 in the first fixture. Bragging rights are very much a thing here.

• About that little empire: Eldense isn’t Messi’s only Spanish club. In April he bought UE Cornellà, a fifth-tier side on the outskirts of Barcelona (its alumni include Jordi Alba and David Raya). And in Uruguay, he and Luis Suárez co-founded Deportivo LSM in 2025 — and it was promoted to the third tier in its first season. La Pulga can’t stop, won’t stop.

4. 💸 Apartment scammer tricks 800 tourists in Madrid

It started Friday. Visitors from Nigeria, Morocco, Ecuador, even a guy from San Sebastián arrived in a constant trickle, looking for the apartment they had rented on Booking.com, the one alongside Retiro Park at Av. de Menéndez Pelayo 19, eager to drop off their bags, take a load off, and see the best Madrid had to offer. One problem, though: it didn’t exist.

• The news: A scammer listed a non-existent apartment on Booking with a great value proposition: €90–€180 a night for a supposedly fabulous 53m² apartment with a king-size bed, breakfast, parking, private bathroom, airport transfer, spa and 24-hour multilingual reception. The photos showed a swanky piso with views of a fancy building that isn’t even in the neighborhood. None of it existed. Nada

Still, more than 800 people appear to have fallen for it over five days. A taxi pulls up, someone gets out with luggage, looks at No. 19, looks at their phone, then looks very confused.

• The building is residential. There is no tourist apartment. There is, however, a sign on the door helpfully explaining that the accommodation doesn’t exist and suggesting guests report the payment to the police. ¡Bienvenidos a Madrid!

The sidewalk had become an international support group by Tuesday night, El País reports in a lovely, bemused article featuring Nigerians, Moroccans, Ecuadorians, Poles, Russians, business travelers, students and that guy from San Sebastián, all standing around with suitcases wondering where they were going to sleep.

• Setting the scene. The building’s concierge, Cris Bellón, had apparently become the unofficial Madrid tourist office. “Look, another one!” she reportedly exclaimed as yet another taxi pulled up. At one point, about 50 stranded guests were milling around outside.

The best/worst part? The fake apartment was still listed on Booking.com at the time of the article’s publication (it appears to have since been taken down). And it had a 7.7 rating and more than 700 reviews, including glowing comments about the “cleanliness and friendliness of the owner” and one guest praising its location in… Ría de Ferrol, Galicia. (Scammers can’t be choosers when it comes to cloning reviews and descriptions, it seems.)

• We give them five stars for imagination. Zero stars for having an actual apartment (or, like, common human decency.) 🥴

5. 🎭 Lorca’s theater lives on: 45 lost photographs discovered

Imagine going to the theater while bombs are falling on your city. That’s exactly what thousands of people did in Valencia on Aug. 29, 1937, when La Barraca, the theater company founded by legendary playwright Federico García Lorca, performed three short plays by Cervantes. Now, almost 90 years later, 45 previously unseen photographs of that extraordinary afternoon have been discovered.

• Better than a time capsule. The photographs show young actors performing in Valencia’s Viveros Gardens before an enormous crowd of perhaps 2,000 people, reports El País.

• A family affair. There are children perched on their fathers’ shoulders, soldiers, farmers and families enjoying an afternoon of theater in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.

And they were literally sitting in a can. The images were taken by German photographer Walter Reuter, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and later documented the war for the Spanish Republic.

• His negatives were among more than 4,000 discovered a decade ago inside an old film canister at filmmaker Guillermo Fernández Zúñiga’s home. Archivist Aku Estebaranz identified the 45 photographs while cataloging the collection.

But what exactly was La Barraca? It was Lorca’s ambitious project, back in 1932, to bring classical Spanish theater to ordinary people, particularly those living in rural areal who rarely had access to performances. University students traveled around Spain staging plays by writers such as Cervantes and Lope de Vega, often in public squares.

• Lorca felt theater belonged to everyone. La Barraca represented his belief that culture shouldn’t be reserved for the rich or educated. And after his death, the company continued performing, even entertaining Republican soldiers and wounded patients during the Civil War.

• The tragedy? Lorca never saw this performance. He had already been arrested and executed by forces aligned with Franco’s military uprising near Granada in August 1936. His left-wing associations, outspoken cultural views, and homosexuality made him a target of the repression unleashed by the Nationalists.

And if you’ve seen La Bola Negra, there’s an interesting connection here. Los Javis’ film draws inspiration from an unfinished Lorca work and these newly discovered photographs offer another glimpse into Lorca’s world and the cultural legacy that survived his murder.

• Perhaps the most remarkable detail? While Valencia endured air raids and the Republic fought for survival, thousands of people still gathered to watch a group of students perform Cervantes.

Long live Lorca.

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Living in Spain comes with plenty of bureaucratic nightmares paperwork: getting your Cl@ve, filing your taxes, discovering the joys of being an autónomo. And if you’re American, there’s one more thing for the list this autumn: voting in the U.S. midterms.

The good news? There’s a straightforward place to start: request your ballot, check your state’s instructions, and give yourself enough time to return it.

Ahead of the November 2026 midterms, we spoke with Andrew Anderson, Chair of Democrats Abroad Spain, during a Substack Live about voting from overseas. He shared answers to 10 common questions, from eligibility to the misconception that overseas votes don’t count.

Here’s what you need to know to vote from Spain.

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1. Can U.S. citizens living in Spain vote in the 2026 midterms?

Yes. Eligible U.S. citizens living in Spain can vote in U.S. federal elections from abroad. That includes retirees, working professionals, students studying overseas, and dual citizens.

You must meet the voting-age requirement of 18 and your state’s eligibility and registration requirements. Living in Madrid, Málaga, or Mallorca does not, by itself, mean giving up your vote.

Start by checking your registration status and the requirements for your voting state. Don’t assume that having voted in a previous election means your overseas ballot is already on its way.

2. Can I vote if I’m a U.S. citizen who has never lived in the United States?

You may be able to, depending on your state’s rules. The accompanying voter guide explains that many states allow U.S. citizens born abroad who have never lived in the United States to vote using a U.S. citizen parent’s last American address.

This is a case where the details matter. Check the rules for the state connected to your parent’s last U.S. residence through VoteFromAbroad.org, and contact the relevant election office if you need clarification.

Having never lived in the United States is a reason to check your eligibility—not to assume you cannot vote.

3. How do I register to vote from Spain and request an absentee ballot?

Use the Federal Post Card Application, or FPCA, to register and request your absentee ballot. It combines both tasks in one form.

• The voter guide recommends VoteFromAbroad.org, a free website that walks you through questions specific to your state and generates a form ready to submit.

Complete the application and follow the submission instructions for your state. If your election office asks for additional information, respond promptly: an unfinished application can hold up the next step.

4. Do I need to request a ballot again if I voted from Spain before?

Submit a new FPCA each calendar year, even if you voted from abroad in a previous election cycle. That is the guidance in the accompanying voter guide.

Treat your overseas ballot request as an annual task. Being registered to vote and having requested a ballot for the current year are separate things to check.

If you voted in the last presidential election but haven’t submitted an FPCA for 2026, check your state’s requirements and deadlines on www.votefromabroad.org.

5. What is the deadline to request and return my ballot from Spain?

Ballot request deadlines are coming up fast! There is no single deadline that every American in Spain can follow. Check your state’s deadlines for registration, ballot requests, and ballot return, along with the instructions that apply to your ballot.

Anderson’s clearest advice during our conversation was to check your status and request your ballot immediately, then resolve any problems with your election office as quickly as possible.

If you must return by postal mail, allow time for international delivery. The voter guide gives an estimated mailing time of one to three weeks from Spain to the United States. That is an estimate, not a guarantee.

6. How will I receive my U.S. absentee ballot in Spain?

Your local election office sends your ballot after approving your application.

The voter guide recommends choosing electronic delivery where available to avoid international postal delays.

One distinction matters here: receiving your ballot electronically does not necessarily mean you can return it electronically. Read the return instructions before deciding how to send your completed ballot back.

7. Can I return my ballot online, or do I have to mail it from Spain?

It depends on your state. Some states accept completed ballots by email or secure online upload; others require postal return.

This point was clarified during the live conversation. One participant described a New Jersey process involving both electronic and paper copies, but every state is different!

Follow the instructions supplied with your own ballot (‼️), including any requirement to return a paper copy after an electronic submission. If mailing is required, send it early enough to meet your state’s deadline.

8. What should I do if my absentee ballot hasn’t arrived?

Contact your local election office promptly and ask for help. You can also use the Voter Helpdesk through VoteFromAbroad.org.

Anderson explained that Democrats Abroad Spain has trained volunteers who can help voters with ballot problems and direct them to the appropriate support.

• If you requested your ballot in 2026 using the FPCA and it hasn't arrived yet, you can send in a backup ballot while waiting for your regular ballot to arrive. More information here.

9. How can I check whether my ballot has been received?

Check with your state or local election office. Anderson explained that voters can use their state’s ballot-tracking resources, with VoteFromAbroad.org helping them find the relevant information.

Contact the election office directly by email or phone if the status is unclear or a problem appears.

Keep following the process after sending your ballot. If officials request a correction or further information, respond as quickly as possible.

10. Do overseas ballots actually count?

Yes. Being cast from overseas is not a reason for a ballot to be disregarded. Anderson directly rejected that misconception during our conversation.

Your ballot still needs to meet the applicable eligibility, submission, and deadline requirements. That is why checking your state’s instructions, returning it on time, and following up on any problems matters.

The practical starting point is VoteFromAbroad.org: check your state, complete your ballot request, and follow the instructions through to the end.

This guide is part of a nonpartisan voter campaign paid for by Democrats Abroad to help eligible Americans in Spain vote from abroad, regardless of party.

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

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Props’ first reader mailbag

What a week it’s been! When I asked last week for suggestions from Props readers about how we might fix Spain’s housing crisis, little did I know I’d also get two failed housing decrees and a snap election. I mean, when it rains, it pours, amirite?

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who wrote in. The suggestions were innovative, eye-catching, and very much not the run-of-the-mill ideas that Spain’s two main parties trot out when they feel pressured to do something — anything — about the country’s very real housing crisis. Thank you!

Now let’s get into the mailbag. I’ll break the ideas down by subject, because many of you had common targets for your commentary. (The comments have been condensed for length.)

Let us count the ways:

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🗳️ Sánchez pulls the trigger: Spain is going back to the polls

Well, here we go again. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has finally called a snap general election for November 29, bringing an early end (nine months, actually) to a legislature that had become a nightmare to govern.

• Sánchez said in a brief live address, his government has “made mistakes,” but argued that if it wants to “do more,” it now needs to “renew and expand the support of the people.”

• The trigger was Friday’s defeat of the government’s two housing decrees, followed by a weekend of demonstrations across Spain demanding action on the housing crisis.

Why call an election now? Besides the fact that we have a non-government in power? Well… Sánchez appears to be betting that the housing crisis has changed the political mood.

• Tens of thousands of people demonstrated across Spain this weekend, while the encampment that began in Puerta del Sol after the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal continued to spread beyond Madrid. What started with one eviction has become a much broader movement over rents, evictions and housing affordability.

The left suddenly looks... alive? After months of terrible polling, political/corruption scandals and progressive voters feeling unmotivated, housing has put thousands of people back on the streets around an issue traditionally associated with the left (although people are angry at the left too over this).

• That’s the gamble. Rather than spend months trying to keep an increasingly zombie Parliament alive, Sánchez is asking voters to decide what happens next while housing anger is still dominating the national conversation.

• The PSOE is betting that the anger over housing can mobilize voters who had become disillusioned with the government and turn the election into a fight over who voters trust to solve the crisis.

• No love for Sánchez though. Far from it. The Sol camp has criticized successive governments for allowing the housing crisis to get this bad, and activists have vowed to keep going, with the Tenants’ Union calling for a general strike.

If Spain voted today… Sánchez would lose. And pretty badly. (The parties to his left are in worse shape; they are expected to announce a broad coalition on Oct. 17). Most polls, including those from PSOE-friendly El País, put the center-right PP comfortably ahead.

• Do the math and things get even uglier for Sánchez: PP and Vox would together have over 200 seats, comfortably above the 176 needed for an absolute majority.

• But there’s a caveat. These polls were conducted before Friday’s housing vote and before this weekend’s demonstrations (Our take? It’s not really changing much).

• The PP is excited though. “Finally”, they tweeted right after the announcement.

Spain’s streets are full of people demanding change. The clock is ticking.

We’ll cover all of this in detail on our Thursday newsletter, but now at least you have the basics.

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💣 Parliament kills Spain’s housing decrees. Now what?

Well, that went about as badly as the government feared. Parliament rejected both of its emergency housing decrees, killing a package rushed through in response to the extraordinary wave of protests sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal.

• The defeat wasn’t particularly close. The larger first decree fell 178–172, after Junts joined PP, Vox and UPN in voting against it. The second, more ambitious decree was rejected 184–166, with PNV and Coalición Canaria also joining the “no” camp.

• But this is now about much more than housing. Friday’s defeat has exposed just how fucking impossible “difficult” it has become for PM Pedro Sánchez to govern a deeply fragmented Parliament, with politicians on virtually every side openly talking about elections.

• More “reflection". Sánchez is reportedly taking a few days (or hours, maybe) to decide what comes next, including whether to call a snap election that could send us back to the polls as soon as Nov. 29.

🫠 Why did the decrees collapse?

You can thank seven MPs from Junts. Once again, Carles Puigdemont’s Catalan separatist party found itself holding the deciding cards in Sánchez’s Parliament.

• Junts dropped the bomb Thursday night, announcing that it would vote against both decrees.

• The party demanded that the government withdraw the texts and start again. Earlier today, Junts even handed Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez its own proposed decree, which it says should become the basis for new negotiations.

Their argument? Junts says the government’s plan could reduce the supply of rental properties and drive prices higher, while simultaneously failing to go far enough against large speculative funds or adequately protect ordinary families who own property.

• Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez made one final plea, telling Junts that the government had incorporated 90% of the party's proposals and asking its seven MPs to either vote yes or simply abstain.

They didn’t.

😡 Things got pretty ugly in Parliament

This did not feel like a normal legislative debate. With everyone suddenly wondering whether Spain might be heading toward an election, Friday’s debate sounded like the opening day of a campaign.

• Sánchez himself unexpectedly took the floor toward the end, making one final appeal for MPs to consider the consequences for ordinary people rather than party strategy. Housing Minister Rodríguez similarly framed the vote as a choice between citizens and speculative interests.

• Then pretty much everyone went for everyone. Junts spokesperson Míriam Nogueras accused the government of misleading people. ERC’s Gabriel Rufián attacked Junts for siding with PP and Vox, dramatically placing a €50 bill and his house keys on the lectern (“We pick the people, you pick the money”).

The protesters are furious. As MPs debated inside Parliament, protesters who had been camping in Puerta del Sol marched the roughly 600 meters to Parliament, where a large police presence and barriers kept them away from the building.

• Back in Sol, the mood had already turned angry Thursday night after Junts announced its decision. The camp had grown to more than 1,300 tents and an estimated 2,000 people, spilling from the square into Calle Arenal. Activists insisted that the movement was never simply about getting one decree passed and vowed to continue mobilizing.

• The Tenants’ Union was especially furious with Junts, arguing that the party wasn’t putting the government “against the ropes” but rather millions of tenants. It has now begun discussing a general strike.

And here’s the politically interesting bit: public opinion on housing doesn’t neatly divide along left-right lines.

• Agreement? A new 40dB poll conducted for El País and Cadena SER (grain of salt: both are owned by the generally pro-PSOE Grupo Prisa) found 67.5% of Spaniards support limiting housing prices even if doing so reduces landlords’ returns. That includes 82.6% of PSOE voters and 95.8% of Sumar voters, but also 56.5% of PP voters and 55.2% of Vox voters.

Which brings us to the much bigger question: Is Sánchez about to call an election? Maybe. But not today, apparently.

• Sánchez spent all day reportedly listening to ministers and party figures with very different opinions about what he should do next.

• The clock is ticking, though. If Sánchez wants to hold an election on Nov. 29, the earliest available Sunday, he would need to make the announcement by Monday or Tuesday.

Of course, Sánchez’s government has always been a Frankenstein nightmare. Housing didn’t create Sánchez’s parliamentary problem. It exposed just how bad it had become.

• Sánchez has governed through one of history's strangest parliamentary coalitions since the 2023 election. PSOE and Sumar don’t have anything close to a majority on their own, meaning almost every important vote has required assembling support from ERC, EH Bildu, PNV, BNG and, critically, Junts.

• That arrangement got Sánchez in office. But it never gave him a reliable governing majority.

The housing vote therefore presented Sánchez with a much bigger question than whether the two decrees would survive: If the government can’t pass major legislation even when responding to one of the country’s biggest problems and enormous protests in the streets, what exactly is this Parliament still capable of doing? (Spoiler alert: almost nothing).

• We’ll cover all of this next week, but now at least you have the basics.

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And you know it’s October when the military planes start rehearsing for the National Day military parade over Madrid on Oct. 12, but for a split second, the first time you hear them, you think the Russians are finally at it.

• No rest for the angry. This week has been an emotional rollercoaster. Between the exhaustion caused by protesting/camping at Puerta del Sol and the existential anguish caused by La Bola Negra, it really feels like we need a break.

• We have options. Yes, Guitarricadelafuente and Evanescence (Google it, kids!) are performing in Madrid this weekend, but tickets are sold out 😪. Maybe there are still tickets available for Shakira?

If that still doesn’t work for you, I have a few interesting options.

Happy weekend!

1. 🎷Madrid's biggest jazz festival is back (please don’t do jazz hands)

Does Gen Z like jazz? It’s one of those things I’m not really clear about. You know, like Uggs. Is it ironic consumption? Do they genuinely like it? Or is it cheugy? (Google it, boomers). Whatever the case may be, I think jazz is pretty cool (I even dabbled in it when my mother, a jazz singer, invited me for a duet. Fortunately, I didn’t quit my day job).

But I digress. If you like jazz, clear your calendar for the next two months! JAZZMADRID returns today, bringing some of the biggest names in international jazz to venues across the capital for nearly two months of concerts.

• The lineup is pretty amazing. Cécile McLorin Salvant, Paquito D’Rivera, Kenny Barron, Chris Potter, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Al Di Meola, Ibrahim Maalouf, Samara Joy, Lizz Wright and Richard Bona are among the dozens of international artists heading to Madrid, alongside a strong Spanish contingent including Rita Payés, Andrea Motis and Moisés P. Sánchez. All people you should know (and probably don’t because you’re more focused on Taylor Swift’s new ringtone song).

• Happy 100th, Miles and Trane. This year marks the centenary of the births of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane (Google them, kids!), so naturally JAZZMADRID is going big on both. Several concerts will reinterpret their music, including Emmet Cohen’s Miles & Coltrane at 100, James Carter’s Trane: A Centennial Supreme and Emma-Jean Thackray’s Dear Miles: A Love Letter.

• And it’s taking over the city. The main program spreads across Fernán Gómez, CentroCentro and Condeduque, but partner programs bring jazz to the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Teatro Albéniz, clubs, cultural centers and neighborhoods across Madrid.

Translation: If you want to know the real meaning of “farming aura” (Google it, boomers!), grab a glass of wine and head over to a jazz club.

🎷 What: JAZZMADRID 2026: Madrid International Jazz Festival

📍 Where: Multiple venues across Madrid

📅 When: Oct. 2 to Nov. 30

🎟️ Tickets: Check website.

2. 🎨 Cruza Carabanchel 2026: Get out of downtown Madrid, cross the river, and discover Carabanchel

If you think you’re cool because you and your friends go to brunch in Malasaña on a Saturday morning, think again. You are, like, basically sheeple. Real cool people cross the Manzanares River and go for some bitter torrefacto in Carabanchel, Madrid’s up-and-coming, artsy neighborhood that is claiming its own identity and rejecting the snobbish trend of comparing every grungy neighborhood to SoHo. So we’ll call it, I don’t know, Madrid’s Bushwick.

• As it fights gentrification and asks for it to be called Carabanchel, Madrid’s Bushwick is hosting the fourth edition of Cruza Carabanchel, which (seriously now) turns one of the city’s most interesting creative districts into a giant, neighborhood-wide cultural festival through Sunday.

• Basically, Carabanchel is the venue. Rather than concentrating everything in one place, the festival spreads exhibitions, theater, dance, concerts, literary events, workshops, and meetups across cultural spaces throughout the district. It’s a fantastic opportunity for you to see it, fall in love with it, buy an apartment there, and bring up property value so the people who have been living there their entire lives have to move somewhere else.

• Anyway, it’s fun! More than 100 established and emerging artists are taking part, with a program spanning visual arts and design, performing arts, crafts, literature, and music.

• And that’s sort of the point. The festival is organized by Carabanchel Distrito Cultural, a community of local artists, collectives, cultural organizations, and residents trying to put the neighborhood’s increasingly vibrant creative scene on Madrid’s cultural map.

• Our advice? Wander. Pick a couple of things from the program that look interesting and use them as an excuse to explore the neighborhood.

Also, don’t buy property there.

🎨 What: Cruza Carabanchel Cultural Festival

📍 Where: Various venues across Carabanchel

📅 When: Through Oct. 4

🎟️ Tickets: Free, but check website for individual activities

3. 💃 Nascencia: Fall down, get up, flamenco

If this week has left you feeling emotionally battered (you know it has), here’s some interpretive dance for that. Madrid’s Spanish Ballet is premiering a new show at Teatros del Canal about something we could probably all use right now: picking yourself up after everything goes to shit hell.

• From darkness to light. Conceived as a contemporary Spanish dance suite, the show follows a journey from pain and adversity to rebuilding and rebirth, combining Spanish folk traditions, flamenco, and contemporary dance.

• The drama. Live flamenco music accompanies the dancers, while lighting and color transform along with them as the piece moves from darkness toward something considerably more hopeful.

• They’re the new kids on the block (not the quintuagenery boy band, of course). The Ballet Español de la Comunidad de Madrid was only created in 2024, with the mission of keeping traditional forms like flamenco, escuela bolera, folklore, and stylized Spanish dance alive while also dragging them into the 21st century.

Anyway, whenever there’s a flamenco show that’s not a tourist trap, I like to mention it. This is one of those.

💃 What: Ballet Español de la Comunidad de Madrid

📍 Where: Teatros del Canal, Calle de Cea Bermúdez 1, Madrid

📅 When: Through Oct. 4

🎟️ Tickets start at €9

4. 👑 Cayetana, Grande de España: Inside the fabulous life of Spain’s most famous duchess

Yes, yes. I am aware. There are hundreds of tents at the Puerta del Sol, and people are rightfully angry. But as Dickens would say, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. So why not take a break and go check out the lifestyle of one of Spain’s most talked-about aristocrats (and maybe get angrier while you’re at it)?

• No, I’m not talking about Belén Esteban (not this time, at least). I am talking about the iconic socialite and diosa total Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, 18th Duchess of Alba, whose real name was María del Rosario Cayetana Paloma Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Fernanda Teresa Francisca de Paula Lourdes Antonia Josefa Fausta Rita Castor Dorotea Santa Esperanza Fitz-James Stuart y Silva. And no, I am not kidding.

• Just call her Cayetana. This new exhibition at the beautiful Palacio de Liria (unlike you, she was actually born there) celebrates her centenary by bringing together more than 200 objects, including works of art, haute couture dresses (obviously), photographs, personal letters and possessions, to tell the story of the duchess as patron, collector, painter, opera lover, animal advocate and custodian of the Alba family’s ridiculous artistic inheritance. She was also a Cayetana before it was synonymous with Spain’s young conservative movement (and covered by the NYT).

• And then there’s the house. The Madrid edition adds a section marking 70 years since the reconstruction of the Palacio de Liria. The palace was bombed and looted during the Civil War in 1936, leaving little more than its four façades standing. Cayetana and her first husband, Luis Martínez de Irujo, eventually completed the enormous reconstruction project begun by her father.

The exhibition has been designed specifically around the rooms of Cayetana’s former Madrid residence, so you’re essentially exploring her bougie life inside the place where much of it actually happened.

👑 What: Cayetana. Grande de España

📍 Where: Palacio de Liria, Calle de la Princesa, 20, Madrid

📅 When: Through Jan. 31

🎟️ Tickets start at €20 (you plebs thought it was free? Har, har. Peasants).

5. 📸 A matter of taste: See the world through Martin Parr’s wonderful (and weird) eyes

If you still need a dose of non-Spanish costumbrismo (Google it, foreigners), we’ve got an interesting option. And that’s because nobody photographed ordinary people quite like the legendary British photographer Martin Parr.

• He turned crowded beaches, cheap souvenirs, Kardashian-style tans, questionable fashion choices (not to be repetitive but aka Kardashian fashion), and the general weirdness of modern consumer life into an art form, usually with ridiculously saturated colors and an unforgiving flash worthy of making it to the cover of Vice.

• Now Madrid gets a taste. At Galería Marc Bibiloni, this exhibit brings together some of Parr’s most recognizable work, including images from The Last Resort, his unflattering portrait of 1980s British seaside life (pretty much Magaluf in 2026), and Common Sense, his close-up catalog of mass consumption: fast food, jewelry, painted nails and possible carcinoma sunburned skin.

• Another section explores his unlikely relationship with the fashion world. Parr freely admitted he knew basically nothing about designer labels, which may explain why his fashion photography looks so unmistakable. Instead of glamour, you get fur coats, bouffant hair and wrinkles (which is way more fun).

• Bittersweet timing. Parr died last December, making the exhibition an opportunity to revisit the unique visual language he left behind.

Spend enough time with his photographs, and you’ll start seeing Parr pictures everywhere: on the beach, at the supermarket, even in the mirror (I speak from experience).

📸 What: Martin Parr: A Matter of Taste

📍 Where: Galería Marc Bibiloni, Divino Vallés 12, Madrid

📅 When: Through Oct. 28

🎟️ Tickets: Free. Check website.

📺 What to watch if you don’t want to leave the couch this weekend…

📺 Mini Series: Veneno | 2020

📍Where to watch: Netflix

❓What’s it about: A biographical story of Spanish TV personality and transgender icon La Veneno and those who surrounded her during the 90s and the 00s. Directed by Los Javis, it’s probably one of the best miniseries of this decade. You will laugh, and you will cry (a lot).

🤩 Why you should watch: Because it’s one of the best ways to understand a very particular piece of modern Spanish culture. It’s about queer and trans life before Spain became one of Europe’s most LGBTQ-friendly countries, exploitation, aging, and the difference between being seen and actually being accepted. It’s funny, filthy, campy and devastating.

💬 English Subtitles: No. But you’ll need the Spanish subtitles.

💃🏻 Places to try this weekend…

🥩 Meet your meat at Afuego

What’s it about? Upstairs at Mercado de Chamartín, Afuego is basically what happens when a serious butcher shop and a steakhouse decide to move in together. This place specializes in Spanish and international beef, with cuts ranging from ribeye to porterhouse.

Why you should go: Because choosing the meat is part of the experience. The team will walk you through the different cuts, breeds, and origins and help you figure out what you actually want before it hits the grill.

Bottom line: Come pick a beautiful piece of cow and let people who know considerably more about meat than you do take it from there.

📍 Address: Mercado de Chamartín, Calle de Bolivia 9, Madrid

☕ Círculo Coffee Studio: A little taste of Panama in Madrid

What’s it about: Círculo Coffee Studio is a specialty coffee shop built around Panamanian coffee, bringing carefully selected beans from Panama to Madrid. But the idea goes beyond caffeine: the space mixes coffee with art, culture, and music.

Why you should go: Panama produces some of the world's most sought-after specialty coffee, and Círculo wants you to actually notice what you're drinking rather than mindlessly inhaling an espresso on your way to work.

Bottom line: Come get your caffeine fix and leave knowing considerably more about Panamanian coffee than you did when you walked in.

Address: Calle de las Infantas 30, Madrid

👨🏻‍💻 Viral Videos of the Week

🤩 This dude in San Sebastián casually running into Brad Pitt while jogging

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💣 What will Spain's panicked fast-tracked housing decrees mean for you?

Well, that escalated quickly. What started last week with Maricarmen’s eviction has exploded into a much bigger revolt over Spain's housing crisis. Thousands took to the streets, protesters set up camps, and the government rushed through sweeping measures that could change the rules for millions of renters, landlords, and aspiring homeowners.

But first, some good news: Maricarmen is going back home. The 87-year-old woman whose eviction from the Madrid apartment she's had for 71 years sparked this whole movement has accepted an agreement with the property owner, Urbagestión, allowing her to return once she is discharged from Hospital Gregorio Marañón.

• She will sign a new eight-year lease. Her total monthly housing costs will be around €500, with the agreement guaranteeing they won’t exceed 30% of her net income. She told her lawyer she’s “very happy”.

But the genie is out of the bottle. Maricarmen’s eviction has managed to incense hundreds of thousands of people around the country who have had it up to here (you have to imagine where our hand is) and are apparently now ready to go to war.

• Occupy Sol, housing edition. After a massive protest in downtown Madrid on Saturday afternoon, protesters, led by the Tenants’ Union, decided to set up camp in Puerta del Sol, where there are now reportedly more than 1,000 tents. (Protests and encampments have popped up outside Madrid too.) People want solutions.

The government reacts. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government responded on Tuesday by approving an emergency package of housing measures split into two decrees (the live one and the dead one, but we'll get to that in a sec).

In simple terms, here’s what's in decree #1:

• Renters get more time. Tenants with qualifying leases that expire before the end of 2028 will be able to request a two-year extension, designed in part to prevent landlords from using expiring contracts to impose huge rent increases.

• Evictions get harder. Certain evictions of vulnerable tenants without alternative housing will be suspended until 2030, particularly when the property belongs to an entity covered by the decree’s new definition of a “vulture fund.”

• Goodbye, fake temporary rental? Landlords will have to prove that there’s an actual reason for giving you a temporary contract. If they can’t, it becomes a regular residential lease. Renting apartments room by room to circumvent rent limits also gets much harder.

• Tourist apartments will pay 10% VAT, while municipalities will get more power to increase property taxes on tourist and vacant homes in stressed housing markets.

• Carrot, meet stick. Tenants earning under certain thresholds get new tax deductions, while landlords can get tax breaks for things like lowering the rent or renting to young people in stressed areas.

• First home, anyone? The government’s new Tu Casa program would offer interest-free loans of up to €50,000 to people who can afford a mortgage but can’t scrape together enough money upfront to buy their first home.

• And the “vultures”? Certain purchases by entities the decree classifies as “vulture funds” would be restricted until 2028, while publicly financed housing gets more protection from eventually being sold into the private speculative market.

Then there’s decree #2, which includes one enormous thing: automatically renewable rental contracts.

• Forever tenants. Instead of your landlord just being able to choose not to renew your lease when it ends, most contracts would keep renewing unless the landlord has a legally recognized reason to end it. That's one of the biggest demands of the tenants’ movement and Sumar. Also, landlords who end a rental without a legally justified reason would have to compensate the tenant with lots of money — at least 12 months' worth of rent.

That's why we have two decrees. The government knows that automatic renewals and one-year penalties will be much harder to get through Parliament (we'd bet on impossible). So rather than bundle everything together and likely lose the whole package, PSOE and Sumar separated the controversial measure from everything else.

Junts and Podemos might ruin the fun. Parliament will vote on validating both decrees tomorrow, and Sánchez says he’s “reasonably optimistic” (not sounding so confident) that the measures will survive the vote. Left-ish Sumar obviously backs the package, and other parties on the parliamentary left have more or less expressed support for it. However…

• Center-right PP and far-right Vox: Absolutely not. PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo says the PP will vote against both decrees, arguing that they will reduce the supply of rental properties. Vox is also expected to oppose them.

• Junts: 🤷‍♂️. The right-leaning Catalan separatists say they’re “disappointed and worried,” and aren’t convinced the measures will work. But they haven’t said how they’ll vote. Their votes could be decisive.

• Far-left Podemos: Also 🤷‍♂️. Ione Belarra’s party has been pushing for much more aggressive intervention in the housing market and hasn’t committed either (the very progressive Tenants’ Union, however, is pressuring them to vote yes).

Don't expect the tents (and tension) to disappear anytime soon. Madrid's Tenants' Union says the Sol encampment will continue with acts of “civil disobedience” and has called another protest for Saturday regardless of what happens on Friday.

• Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, meanwhile, wants the national government to clear the “illegal” camp from the square; her government has given the central government's delegate in Madrid 24 hours to order an eviction — or face possible legal action.

More news below. 👇👇

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🎙️ A new episode of The Bubble Podcast is out!

In this new episode, we discuss the Ceuta migration crisis; we have a one-on-one with journalist and writer David Jiménez and discuss weird Spanish obsessions. Subscribe and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 😵 Another possible murder in the arts in Catalonia?

Remember the mysterious death of Isak Andic, the founder of Mango? You should, because we’ve written again and again (and podcasted too!) about how police never believed that his fall from a cliff in Montserrat (Catalonia) was an accident — considering his estranged son was meters away. Well, now the death of one of his most intimate friends — the famous Catalan architect Josep Juanpere — is being investigated as a possible murder. What’s going on in Catalonia with rich older men in the arts?

• What the f*ck? The Mossos d’Esquadra arrested Juanpere’s partner, Belén López, 64, in Madrid on Sept. 23 on suspicion of homicide — nine months after Juanpere was found dead in his Baqueira ski apartment on Dec. 26, 2025. She was released on €80,000 bail after denying all responsibility and declaring she loved him.

The story, as it has emerged from the court filing, is properly bizarre. On Christmas Eve, Juanpere fell ill at dinner with López and his nephew, hit his head on a radiator, and was taken to hospital. He was discharged that night and described as conscious and speaking normally.

• Juanpere’s apartment was a mess from his vomiting after the fall, so López booked three rooms at the AC Baqueira hotel. The next day, Christmas, the couple returned to the apartment, alone, with Juanpere’s diet reduced to small amounts of water with oral rehydration sachets.

When the nephew couldn’t reach them by phone on Dec. 26, he went to the apartment, found his key blocked from inside by another key, and had to force the door open with the old credit-card trick.

• After the nephew got in, López tried to stop him from entering the bedroom, murmuring: “If you’re here you’ll be here, if not you won’t be” — which the media diplomatically attribute to her interest in “alternative therapies.” Once in, he found his uncle unconscious on the floor and called emergency services (there is no record of López having called them). When emergency services arrived, Belén blurted out, apparently unprompted: “I wanted to marry him, and he didn’t want to get married.” Paramedics spent half an hour trying to revive Juanpere, to no avail.

• Trouble in paradise. The judge notes the relationship had been “certainly tense” since the previous summer, and the forensic report identified marks on Juanpere’s neck “compatible with external force.” (López’s lawyers contest this, arguing the marks came from his earlier fall.)

Juanpere was the architect of the Catalan establishment. His firm GCA Architects designed the Torre Puig, the Cuatrecasas headquarters in 22@, and Mango’s vast logistics center. And one of his closest friends was Isak Andic — whose death, he said at the time, affected him greatly. Little did he know he would join him a year later.

• Two close friends. Two suspicious December deaths. Two open murder investigations. Catalonia’s design world is starting to feel like an Agatha Christie novel.

2. 🧑‍🎓 Mr. Handsome attacked by the Harvard Youths

We know we said New York was Pedro Sánchez’s happy place last week. And it largely was. But then he went to Boston, which was not so nice. (We’re not big fans of Boston either, so we sympathize.)

• Haaaaarvard. Sánchez showed up at the Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum to deliver a real diatribe against the Tech Bros — Elon, Zuck, that weirdo Peter Thiel — comparing A.I.’s unchecked development to “a new nuclear arms race” and declaring that “we will not put the future of humanity in the hands of a few billionaires.” Strong stuff. The Harvard kids loved it. (Honestly, most people do.)

Then came the Q&A. And things did not go as planned.

First up came Peter, an AI researcher. He asked — in English, with an American accent (the amazing accent in the video above is a voiceover) — about the corruption cases involving Sánchez’s wife, his brother, and the former attorney general.

• Answer #1. Sánchez acknowledged that, yeah, there had been corruption in his government and party (”those cases are certain, unfortunately”) but drew a sharp line with family. As in, his wife and brother were a different matter entirely. “A young student like you is already condemning them,” he said, visibly pained. “You say my brother and my wife are guilty, and that is not fair because they are not.” (Actually, his brother was found guilty, but anyway…) The audience, mostly sympathetic, murmured.

Next, Nicolás asked the spicy one. Given that Sánchez’s phone was hacked by Pegasus — widely attributed to Morocco’s government — did that have anything to do with Spain’s subsequent flip on Western Sahara?

• Answer #2. Sánchez confirmed the hacking, denied the connection, and suggested the rest was disinformation. “Why should I have to defend myself from fake news?” he asked. Which is a pretty good line if you can pull it off. And which sounds like B.S. if you can’t.

Finally, Daniel asked about Venezuela — and about whether Sánchez would distance himself from former PM José Luis Zapatero’s chummy relationship with the country’s dictator/president Nicolás Maduro.

• Answer #3. Sánchez said Spain never recognized Maduro’s election results and always supports free elections. Of Zapatero, he said exactly nothing. Just sailed right past it. 🌬️

Dude must have missed New York. And after Maricarmen, even more so.

3. 🌶️ Pepper spray-gate is the stupidest scandal to hit Parliament in a long time

Not on our bingo card. Of all the controversies currently consuming Spanish politics (trust us, there are many), we weren’t expecting one involving pepper spray, an evacuated bathroom, and parliamentary aides playing dumb. And yet, here we are.

• Remember when Ceuta was a thing? Last week (right before Maricarmen), PP MP Ana Vázquez was questioning Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska about security in Ceuta when she dramatically pulled out a canister of pepper spray in the middle of Parliament.

• Vázquez claimed her point was that women and children in Ceuta have to carry the stuff because they no longer feel safe following this summer’s migration crisis.

• Show her the door. However, pepper spray is considered a weapon under Parliamentary rules, so Speaker Francina Armengol ordered Vázquez to leave the chamber and get rid of it. Vázquez was furious, repeatedly saying as she was leaving that the can was empty.

Narrator voice: It was not empty. A few minutes later, a strong smell began spreading through the Parliament building. Three bathrooms were sealed off, offices were partially evacuated, and 12 people required medical attention, including a member of a visiting Mauritanian delegation. It really smelled like pepper spray.

• Whoopsie! After a few hours of mystery, a PP staffer acknowledged that Vázquez had asked him to “clean” the supposedly empty canister. He took it into a bathroom, pressed the nozzle “two or three times,” and, surprise, pepper spray came out. The gas then spread beyond the bathroom.

• Backfire. PP MPs were… not happy with the stunt and spoke to the media about their frustration over how this dumb episode had distracted from precisely the issue Vázquez had been trying to highlight.

Not over yet. On Tuesday, Parliament formally opened disciplinary proceedings against Vázquez, with PSOE and Sumar members of the congressional governing board voting in favor (PP members opposed the move, obvi).

• She has 10 days to respond. If the process ultimately results in punishment, Vázquez could temporarily lose her status as an MP, along with her salary and voting rights.

Some scandals are complicated. Pepper spray-gate really isn’t.

4. 📈 Prices going up, up, up

Housing prices are bad enough, but have you tried to afford a banana 🍌 lately? Joking (a bit) — but the news is not good. Annual inflation in Spain jumped again in September, hitting its highest level since February 2023. Remember Ukraine? That was fun.

• The latest: Spain’s September consumer price index came in at 4.9%, up from 4.3% in August and above analyst expectations. Core inflation — which strips out energy and fresh food — rose to 3.1%. Unprocessed food is up 5.8% (hence the banana joke). Energy is up 21.6%. Which is 😬.

The culprit, again, is the 🍊. Trump’s Iran war has partially blocked the vital Strait of Hormuz — through which the oil normally doth flow — keeping the price of crude, and by extension gas, stubbornly high.

• We’ve been here before. Last month we noted that August’s 4.3% shocker was being driven by the same fuel spike, with core inflation still relatively contained. The worry now is that that “containment” will go away. Fresh food prices are already rising fast, and BBVA Research thinks inflation will stay above 4% through year-end even without further shocks.

• For context (which we know you love), yesterday France came in at 3.4% and Italy at 4.1% — both elevated, but both well below Spain. The European Central Bank, which has raised rates twice to 2.5%, is watching and shaking its head. More rate jumps ahead!

The really unfortunate thing? Spain is already the OECD country that spends the most trying to stop inflation. The government has now committed over €12bn across three anti-crisis packages (i.e. tax holidays and subsidies). That’s more than Germany (€4.1bn), more than France, more than anyone. In fact, Spain leads the Bruegel think tank’s ranking of energy subsidy spending by a big ass margin.

• The OECD, the European Commission, and the ECB have all gently suggested that blanket subsidies stoke the very demand that drives inflation, and that maybe they should be targeted at vulnerable households. Spain (along with most European governments, to be fair) has ignored this advice.

Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo put a brave face on it Tuesday. He noted that “about two percentage points” of the September inflation are pure energy, that government measures have “absorbed about 50% of the increase in gas and diesel prices,” and that “the cushion has worked.” Yeah…

5. 🎬 Spanish cinema is having one hell of a year

Yes, streaming killed the movie theater’s star, but maybe things are changing? Have we suddenly grown tired of lying on the couch, browsing endlessly? Are we now looking for more human connection, to laugh and cry together before the silver screen?

Whatever the case may be, Spanish movies are suddenly making serious money at the box office.

• After years of failing to crack €100m in domestic ticket sales, 2026 is now on course to potentially become the second-biggest year for Spanish cinema ever. And two wildly different movies are doing much of the heavy lifting: Torrente, presidente and, now, La bola negra.

• Los Javis have a monster hit on their hands. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La bola Negra opened last Friday in Spain and took €4.67m over its first weekend, the ninth-biggest opening ever for a Spanish movie and the second-biggest Spanish opening of the past decade. By Tuesday, the film had passed €6.6m, after reportedly notching the best Tuesday ever recorded by a Spanish film.

What’s the movie about? It’s inspired by an unfinished work by poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (who was killed in the Civil War), and it follows the story of gay men across three periods of Spanish history.

• Big cast. It stars Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, Miguel Bernardeau, Lola Dueñas and Guitarricadelafuente. (Spain has selected it as its submission for the international feature Oscar, but we have a feeling it could win Best Picture).

Crazy numbers. Analysts think La Bola Negra could eventually make somewhere around €20–30m (not much for an Avengers movie, huge for Spain). If it reaches the upper end, it could join Torrente, presidente, which has already made more than €28m this year. (Spain has never had two homegrown movies pass €25m in the same year).

• And they’re basically cinematic opposites. One is the latest installment of Santiago Segura’s proudly vulgar Torrente franchise; the other is a two-and-a-half-hour Lorca-inspired queer historical drama from the Javis. Both have managed to get young people into movie theaters.

With La bola negra included, Spanish films have already grossed more than €83m in 2026, more than they made during the entirety of 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025, with three months still to go.

• This year's Spanish films are now expected to sail past 2019's €94mn, with optimistic projections putting the total above €110m.

• If that happens, 2026 would be behind only 2014, when a little movie called Ocho Apellidos Vascos casually made €56m all by itself.

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In this episode of The Bubble Podcast, we unpack immigration in Spain, interview journalist and author David Jiménez about El director and the relationship between media and power, and explore some of Spain’s most inexplicable cultural obsessions.

First, Adrián Bono and Ian Mount explain the Ceuta migration crisis: what happened, why it matters in Spanish politics and society, and what its long-term implications could be for Spain and the rest of Europe.

Then, Ignacio de los Reyes interviews David Jiménez https://open.spotify.com/show/3ojf91tANXd6VVz4pd6rbF?si=18c5601ac36d4fe4 ahead of the release of his film, El director, in Spanish cinemas this autumn. David explains why he believes Ceuta marks a turning point in Spanish attitudes towards immigration. They also discuss journalism in Spain and the tangled relationship between the media, political power and big business.

Finally, Adrián Bono and Ignacio de los Reyes explore Spain’s strangest traditions and cultural obsessions, from quirky celebrations to everyday objects found in Spanish homes that might horrify a foreign visitor. A journey through Spanish nostalgia, and the things Spaniards struggle to explain about themselves.

Hosted by Ian Mount, Adrián Bono and Ignacio de los Reyes.

Created in collaboration with A13 Content.

Follow us for more videos, leave a comment, and don’t forget to subscribe if you enjoy the show.

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🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

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Can Spain fix its housing problem by decree? Or does it need us?

There's one story in Spanish real estate this week — the eviction by judicial order of Maricarmen Abascal, who was forced out of the apartment where she had lived for 71 years.

The sight of a tearful Maricarmen being forcibly removed on a stretcher set off protests in Madrid — "fury", in the FT's words — first in front of Madrid regional presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso's €6.3m penthouse attic, and then in a march of tens of thousands and, finally, in a tent encampment that continues in the city's central Puerta del Sol.

The explosion of fury was set off by Maricarmen's eviction, but it wasn't about that, or at least not just that. (There are worse tales — like Olga, a 52-year-old who committed suicide five months after being evicted from her home of 20 years in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, near Barcelona.) It was born of widespread anger at a property market that for generations served as a kind of ally, a tool that allowed people to find stability and some wealth and start families. But that recently has become something to be feared — a predator. 🧌

Why? The fears are many.

• When your lease ends, your landlord demands a 100% increase to re-up your contract. “It's the market price. 🤷‍♂️ Sorry.”

• The only apartments you can find are 11-month pisos de temporada, meaning you have to gird yourself for possible annual moves.

• A fund buys your building and kicks you out when your lease expires, in preparation for selling your place.

• The price to buy anything has risen so high you can't imagine saving enough for the down payment — not to mention the monthly mortgage checks, which have shot up alongside inflation from the 🍊 Menace's adventure in Iran.

• You'll never leave your childhood bedroom in your parents’ home.

• You'll definitely never start a family.

Now, there's been a happy ending of sorts (at least for Maricarmen). She accepted a new rental contract offered by the business that bought her apartment, and will return to it at the same rent. And, in the face of public fury, the PSOE-led government passed two decree laws to offer some protections to renters like Maricarmen and young people looking to buy.

But the decrees are band-aids. Spain’s housing crisis is structural, deeper, and decades in the making. We want to know what you think actually fixes it — bold ideas, half-baked theories, things that worked elsewhere, anything. Send your best thinking to ian@thebubble.com, and we’ll run the most thought-provoking responses next week. Don’t be shy.

Let's look at what we're facing:

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And there’s no easy way to say this — fall (aka “autumn”) is here, and the dewy, sweet mornings of summer are now nothing more than a quasi-tactile memory.

• Welcome to another year of La Rentrée, a chicer, more French way of saying “la vuelta al cole” (aka back to school). Just like Satan, it’s got many names. And local bars and nightclubs struggle to find one that doesn’t convey the depression of summer’s ending. “Welcome Back Party!” or “Return to the City!” parties are everywhere to be seen. As if using English and exclamation marks made it less painful.

• Gone are the days of hanging out with your friends at Cibeles until dawn while singing Superestrella, or waking up to the foamy white noise of the Mediterranean splashing against the rocks below your rental apartment’s balcony. That gem of a gelato place by the beach you discovered with your friends? Gone forever (or at least until next summer).

• Face it, friend. The maladies of leading an adult life have finally caught up with us once more, and we march back towards Madrid not sad because it’s over, but joyous because it happened (especially before the rise of the AI overlords that will kill us all).

Anyway, happy weekend! (And welcome back!)

1. 🎭 Manon Lescaut: Watch Puccini ruin everyone’s life (beautifully)

Now that we’re all back to the good old routine, we may need some cathartic experience that feels like letting out a long, horrific internal scream. So why not check out the opera? It’s high-brow, and it makes you look like an intellectual in front of your date.

• Hear me out! There’s doomed romance, really bad decisions, and people singing very loudly (pretty much your summer 2026 experience). Puccini’s Manon Lescaut has returned to Madrid’s opera house for the first time in 102 years, opening the Teatro Real’s new season.

• This was the opera that made Puccini a star. His third opera and first major success follows Manon, a young French woman being sent to a convent who instead falls for the dashing Des Grieux and runs away with him to Paris. Unfortunately, love is nice, but poverty is not, and Manon eventually leaves him for the considerably richer Geronte. Things do not improve from there. (See? Never choose money over love.)

• The new production puts Manon on a literal merry-go-round. The action unfolds around a rotating carousel-like structure that transforms into a bar, prison, and other settings, turning her increasingly disastrous choices into an endless cycle she can’t escape.

The whole thing is in Italian (with Spanish and English subtitles), but honestly, who cares. It’s the opera.

🎭 What: Manon Lescaut by Giacomo Puccini

📍 Where: Teatro Real, Plaza de Isabel II, Madrid

📅 When: Through Oct. 11, check website for hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €19

2. 🎨 Estampa Contemporary Art Fair 2026: Pretend you’re a rich art collector for the afternoon

If Madrid Fashion Week left you wanting to stand around another enormous IFEMA pavilion looking sophisticated, we have good news: Estampa Contemporary Art Fair is back this weekend, bringing dozens of galleries and a frankly dangerous amount of art you may suddenly decide to buy even though your €3.99/month Revolut card just can’t take it anymore.

• Estampa is one of Madrid’s big contemporary-art market events, bringing together established Spanish galleries including Max Estrella, Espacio Mínimo, Cayón and VETA alongside younger galleries and emerging spaces from across Spain and abroad.

• This year’s guest artist is Esther Ferrer, one of the pioneers of performance and conceptual art in Spain. The 89-year-old artist (whose work spans performance, photography, collage, drawing and sound) will present her latest project at the fair.

• Don’t worry if you’re not actually buying anything. Beyond browsing gallery stands, Estampa includes talks, debates, curated sections and Ensayo Futuro, a program dedicated to emerging galleries and experimental spaces.

• But people definitely are buying. The number of artists whose work sold at Estampa nearly doubled between 2017 and 2025, from 120 to 233. So maybe practice thoughtfully staring at something before whispering, “Interesting use of space.”

And remember, you don’t need to understand contemporary art. Just tilt your head slightly and say, “This piece interrogates the liminal space between materiality and absence, while simultaneously destabilizing our relationship with the object as object,” or something like that.

🖼️ What: Estampa Contemporary Art Fair - 34th edition

📍 Where: Pavilion 5, IFEMA, Avenida del Partenón 5, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 24–27. Check website for opening hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €22

3. 🇯🇵 Spend the weekend in Japan without leaving Madrid

If you are interested in anime, manga, Pokémon, video games, or dressing up as, say, Punie Tanaka (Google her, kids!), Japan Weekend is back. The massive and extremely popular celebration of Japanese pop culture returns this weekend.

If you don’t speak Japanese, please know that うちらと一緒には座れないよ。!

• Anyway, a LOT is going on. There will be cosplay competitions, concerts, workshops, video games, board games, artists, creators, and stalls filled with handmade goods and tons of merch (prepare your wallet, peasant).

• Pokémon trainers get their own playground. The dedicated Pokémon Zone will host several official tournaments, so this is your opportunity to put all those hours you spent catching imaginary creatures in your late 30s to good use.

• Cosplay is serious business here. Competitions range from the Japan Weekend Cosplay Show and International Cosplay League to a cosplay catwalk, children’s competition, and the Japan Weekend Idol Festival. There’s also karaoke and an Asian Cover Dance competition for K-pop and J-pop. Too late for you to rehearse, probably. But you get to watch.

• And Love Live! fans have a particularly good reason to go. Sayuri Date, Nako Misaki, and Nagisa Aoyama from Liella!, the school-idol group at the center of Love Live! Superstar!!, will perform live. (If you need to read that line again to understand what the hell I’m talking about, that makes two of us).

Understand even half the words in this recommendation? You should definitely go to this.

🎌 What: Japan Weekend Madrid

📍 Where: Riyadh Air Metropolitano, Av. de Luis Aragonés, 4, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 26–27. Check website for opening hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €27

4. 💿 Dig for vinyl treasure at the International Record Fair

Now that it’s clear we’re navigating late-stage capitalism in which The Man expects you to own nothing and be happy (looking at you, Sony 😡), there’s never been a better time to give the middle finger to the digital era by buying physical media. Records, CDs, books, DVDs… even newspapers. Buy them. Buy them all. At least you know they’re yours forever and can’t be taken away.

• Are you tired of streaming services and the intangibility of their products? I have a great suggestion — spend the weekend buying music you can actually hold in your hand.

• Madrid’s International Record Fair returns to Casa de Campo for its 29th edition, bringing together record stores and specialist dealers from Spain, the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and beyond.

• Yes, I will be there on Saturday morning. As a physical enthusiast, I’ve got my ticket ready. Vinyl is properly booming again: 2.18m records were sold in Spain last year, accounting for around 70% of the country’s physical music market. We’re back, baby!

• There’ll be plenty to dig through. Around 130–140 exhibitors will be selling thousands of records, including first pressings, rarities and special editions, alongside CDs, cassettes, books and music memorabilia. (I am building my collection of original James Bond soundtracks, so if you come across a copy of the 1985 A View to a Kill LP, please let me know.)

• You can make a whole afternoon of it. There’ll also be DJs and live music throughout the weekend, including Natal Pride and Whitehole (the names sound bad, but the bands are good) on Saturday, plus an Elvis tribute and Trago Mortal on Sunday.

Come over and leave three hours later carrying a tote bag full of albums (and realizing you now need a turntable to play them).

💿 What: Feria Internacional del Disco de Madrid (29th edition)

📍 Where: Recinto Ferial de la Casa de Campo, Avenida de Portugal 1, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 26 & 27. Check website for opening hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €6,15

5. 📚 Now go relic hunting at the Autumn Fair of Old and Antique Books

Apparently, this is the weekend to rebel against digital media altogether. Now that you’ve got your vinyl, we’re sending you to Paseo de Recoletos, where Madrid’s annual Autumn Fair of Old and Antique Books returns for its 36th edition.

• This thing is basically one enormous outdoor secondhand bookstore. More than 30 booksellers from Madrid and across Spain will set up stalls containing over half a million books (that’s right), with prices starting at just €1.

• And “old books” covers quite a spectrum. You can rummage through cheap secondhand finds or go hunting for genuinely rare editions that have survived for centuries. Trust me, they will look amazing on your bookshelf. So much better than those Paulo Coelho books (if you go on a date with someone who reads them, run 🚩).

• The fair has been around since 1989, when the booksellers’ association LIBRIS began organizing it with Madrid City Hall. This year’s sellers are coming from as far afield as Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Salamanca and Huesca.

• Even the poster is worth checking out. Madrid illustrator Fernando Vicente created this year’s artwork (see above), featuring a woman reading a first edition of Don Quixote with a Tower of Babel made from books rising from her head.

Your Kindle can’t make your apartment smell like a 200-year-old library. Buy a damn book (and read it too).

📚 What: 36th Feria de Otoño del Libro Viejo y Antiguo

📍 Where: Paseo de Recoletos, Madrid

📅 When: Through Oct. 12

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission.

📺 What to watch if you don’t want to leave the couch this weekend…

📺 Mini Series: The Final Problem (El Problema Final) | 2025

📍Where to watch: Netflix

❓What’s it about: In 1959, 13 people are stranded on an islet near Mallorca during a storm. At their small hotel, English tourist Elisa Mander is found dead. When suicide seems unlikely, retired actor Basil, who once played Sherlock Holmes on screen, decides to investigate.

🤩 Why you should watch: Because if you like old-school murder mysteries, this is basically catnip. This four-part adaptation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel features José Coronado alongside Maribel Verdú and María Valverde. It’s “And Then There Were None” meets “Knives Out” with great period costumes and Hitchcockian touches. A must-watch.

💬 English Subtitles: Yes

💃🏻 Places to try this weekend…

☕ Café Libre: Escape Gran Vía without actually leaving it

What’s it about? Café Libre is a café just off the chaos of Gran Vía, built around the very Spanish tradition of the tertulia: sitting around over coffee, reading and talking. Mornings mean espresso and pastries; later in the day, coffee gives way to wine, vermouth and small plates of Spanish delicacies.

Why you should go: Because finding somewhere around Gran Vía where you actually want to linger can be surprisingly difficult. Café Libre is designed as a little refuge from the crowds; somewhere equally suited to reading alone, meeting a friend for coffee, or transitioning seamlessly from afternoon caffeine to evening vermouth.

Bottom line: A stylish little pause button in one of Madrid’s busiest neighborhoods. Come for coffee, bring a book, and see how long it takes before you accidentally order a vermouth.

📍 Address: Calle de Gran Vía 11, Madrid.

🍕 Pizza Pagana: Get thee to a pizzeria

What’s it about: The chefs behind Insurgente have opened Pizza Pagana, a new pizza spot inside Mercado de San Leopoldo near Plaza Castilla. Genaro Celia and Agustín Mikielievich are working with homemade dough fermented for 72 hours, their own sauces, and a menu that mixes classics with considerably less orthodox creations.

Why you should go: Because this isn’t just another market stall selling slices. The pizzas play around with unexpected flavors and textures, while the menu also sneaks in empanadillas.

Bottom line: Long-fermented dough, creative toppings, and chocotorta. Consider us converted to paganism.

Address: Calle de San Leopoldo, 8, Madrid

👨🏻‍💻 Viral Videos of the Week

🫣 Watch the moment World Cup star Ferrán Torres dies inside after being forced to experience the “Oh Ferrán!” meme live

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🇪🇺 The Big Apple is Mr. Handsome's happy place

Never has Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (aka Mr. Handsome) been so happy to leave Spain behind. And who could blame him?

• His unhappy place. Here, he faces a paralyzed parliament, constant criticism over his handling of the migrant crisis in Ceuta (see below 👇), and a whole lot else: a raft of corruption cases targeting his colleagues and family, and upcoming elections that are likely to wipe out his government.

• His happy place. But at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where he is now, he can expect to be fêted as an international leader of the progressive left who makes principled stands for Gaza and against Israel and the 🍊 Menace (aka Donald J. Trump).

(Think USSR boss Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, loathed at home and loved abroad.)

So how's it going? To be honest, the trip's turned out pretty much as he hoped so far.

• Exhibit #1: He got to pass on meeting with Trump. He skipped the U.S. presi's reception for world leaders on Tuesday night, with government spokesperson Elma Saiz saying that Sánchez couldn't attend, “basically because the invitation arrived only recently, when the entire trip had already been planned.” There was nothing on Sánchez's official agenda at the time of Trump's party, but maybe he had a private meeting? (Also, he didn't go last year — King F6 did.) Or maybe he was taping a podcast? 🤔

• Exhibit #2: He got to do Jon Stewart's show. The first event on Sánchez's agenda the next day was the broadcast of his taped visit to the podcast “The Weekly Show" (we’re big fans, Jon!), where he gently mocked the 🍊's "very ideological” speech at the U.N. (you know, the one where Trump threatened to annihilate Iran?), which he noted to Jon's laughter was “not supported by facts and data.”

  • Also with Jon… Sánchez showed his full-throated support for “inclusive and universal multilateralism”, and chastised permanent members of the U.N. Security Council that are violating international law (here's looking at you, Russia and the U.S.). Jon agreed (and we can't say we didn't).

• Exhibit #3: He got to hang with Zohran Mamdani. The next event on Mr. Handsome’s agenda? The role of special guest at a meeting of left-leaning leaders held by New York's surprisingly popular democratic-socialist mayor, who, El Español assures us all, fascinates Sánchez because he is “multicultural, interventionist, an influencer, photogenic, and ‘very cool.’”

  • Mamdani was nice. He held out Sánchez's government as an example: “A commitment to the dignity of workers guides all of us here this morning, and it has also guided the work of Prime Minister Sánchez,” he said, signaling out Spain's extended paternity and maternity leave, ban on conversion therapies for LGBTQ+ folks, and tributes to the victims of Franco’s regime.

• Exhibit #4: He got to speak at the U.N. At his speech this morning (yes, we stayed up), he drew a contrast between Spain and the global rise of nationalism. Pointing to Ceuta, he promised Spain would overcome the migration crisis without “turning migrants into enemies,” breaking the law, or abandoning human rights.

  • He used his favorite lines. He also attacked what he called the “selfishness, ignorance and cruelty” of reactionary governments and “tech oligarchs,” defended international cooperation, and called on progressives not to lose hope in a clearly political speech ahead of Spain’s next general election.

But it wasn't all great, especially at home. Venezuela's (Trump-appointed) leader Delcy Rodríguez went out of her way on Tuesday to find Sánchez at the U.N. assembly, where they kissed hello, and she asked him to keep talking about Venezuela’s political future.

• Long time no see! The exchange only lasted 30 seconds, but Sánchez told her Spain wants to keep the channel open. It was their first face-to-face encounter since the kidnapping capture of Delcy's boss, Nicolás Maduro, in January.

• Awkward. Rodríguez sparked the Delcygate scandal in 2020 when she landed in Madrid despite EU travel restrictions for being, um, part of a corrupt dictatorship, and met onetime minister and Sánchez buddy — and now jailbird — José Luis Ábalos. (And maybe, rumors go, left some suitcases of goodies behind.)

• Cue expected reaction. This meeting with Delcy sparked criticism from Spain's opposition, with Madrid's right-leaning government calling it another “insult to the people of Venezuela.”

In-flight entertainment. Sánchez got some unhappy news on his way to the Big Apple, as he learned midflight that Judge Juan Carlos Peinado had ordered his wife, Begoña Gómez, to stand trial for alleged influence peddling and misuse of public funds. We’ve covered the case a bazillion times and you can expect a lot more.

• Way to ruin the fun, Peinado.

More news below. 👇👇

Are you an American living in Spain? You can vote in U.S. elections from here! If you’re an eligible U.S. citizen, request your ballot now at VoteFromAbroad.org and choose to receive it by email. Once it arrives, complete and return it promptly, following your state’s instructions and deadlines. Need help? The website offers state-by-state guidance and support from voter assistance volunteers. Request your ballot here.

🎙️ Episode 5 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

Subscribe and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🏠 Protests erupt after Maricarmen is evicted from her Madrid home of 71 years (!)

Big-ass (technical term) protests kicked off last night in Madrid — seriously, check them out — after an 87-year-old resident known as Maricarmen was evicted from the Retiro apartment where she had lived since 1956, turning her into perhaps the most visible face yet of Spain’s increasingly bitter housing crisis.

• Who is Maricarmen? Her father rented the apartment under one of Spain’s old lifetime rental contracts when she was a teenager. The lease was eventually passed to her mother and on to her in 2005, but Spanish law did not allow the contract to be inherited twice. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the property owner.

• Crazy rent. The building was sold in 2018 to real-estate company Renta Corporación, which later offered Maricarmen the apartment for €247,000. She couldn’t afford it, and the property was eventually acquired by Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversiones. Maricarmen had been paying around €500 a month; the new owners initially sought €2,650 and later offered €1,650 (still a lot more than her €1,350 monthly pension).

The case explodes. Tenant groups see Maricarmen’s story as an extreme example of the broader problem of investment firms buying residential buildings and seeking higher rents, leaving long-term tenants unable to afford their old homes.

Who’s to blame? Sánchez’s government has blamed the PP for opposing measures designed to stop evictions (he called it “a social tragedy”) and accused Madrid’s PP government of refusing to regulate the housing market. (The PP-controlled Madrid City Hall says it did offer Maricarmen alternative accommodation and social assistance. )

• Friendly fire. Leftish group Sumar, meanwhile, turned on its PSOE coalition partners, demanding they approve a delayed housing decree extending protections for vulnerable tenants. And Catalan leftist ERC’s Gabriel Rufián warned that “housing will sweep this government away” if it fails to tackle the crisis.

Eviction day. Hundreds gathered outside, with around 100 supporters spending the night there. Even one “well-known writer” (we don’t know who she is) offered to cover Maricarmen’s rent for the rest of her life. The Housing Ministry also tried to buy the apartment. Urbagestión accepted neither solution.

• The Man enforces. Around 50 riot police were deployed yesterday as protesters blocked the entrance and staircases. However, police broke through and, eventually, emergency workers entered the sixth-floor apartment, and Maricarmen left the home for the final time.

Where she goes now isn’t entirely clear. A cousin has offered to take her in temporarily in Segovia, while Madrid City Hall says it made a free emergency residential care place available to her. She has chosen her cousin.

2. 💣 Ceuta is still a pressure cooker

Ceuta's crisis is nowhere near over almost two months after over 70,000 people crossed the border into the Spanish enclave in North Africa. Thousands of migrants (est. 10,000, including many minors, like this wannabe escapee) remain stranded in there while the PSOE-led central government and the PP-led local government are blaming each other for the paralysis.

Then this weekend, things got violent.

• Just another protest. Around 50 protesters gathered at Ceuta’s port on Sunday to oppose the arrival of members of Negu Gorriak/Derecho a Techo, a Navarre-based group that said it was coming to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants. Some accused the group of links to the radical Basque nationalist left.

• Wrong car. When a car belonging to local Ceuta Ya! MP Julia Ferreras arrived from a ferry; protesters mistakenly identified its occupants as members of the group and attacked it (see video above).

• Not just angry windshield tapping. The crowd pelted the car with stones and eggs, smashed its windows, and reportedly tried to pull its occupants out (just like in Catalonia! 👆), while shouting insults and accusing them of being ETA supporters. Ferreras says the attack continued even after she identified herself as an elected representative and told them they had the wrong car. Eventually the police intervened, dispersing the crowd. Police later arrested at least one person.

No open border. Car confusion aside, the Interior Ministry has budgeted €9m to reinforce Ceuta's maritime border, extending the breakwater and installing a permanent floating system capable of suspending a net down to the seabed.

• It would replace the emergency 500-meter floating barrier installed after July’s mass crossing — parts of which have already been damaged by the sea (yikes).

• At last. For the first time since the crisis started, PM Sánchez said Morocco’s border controls “failed” during the crossing and that Spain had demanded “answers and actions” from Morocco. This is a big change of tune after weeks of avoiding direct criticism of Rabat, whose cooperation Spain kinda needs to prevent new crossings and accept returned migrants.

Not a minor problem. Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres says the immediate sticking point is the roughly 3,000 minors still in Ceuta. The national government wants those who cannot be reunited with their families (some already have been) distributed among regions on the mainland.

• The famous “efecto llamada". PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Ceuta president Juan Jesús Vivas (also PP) oppose that solution and argue that transferring them could encourage further crossings.

The scares continue. Intelligence services said they had spotted online calls for another mass crossing into Ceuta and Melilla for this Wednesday — the same day Morocco (an authoritarian regime) was holding elections — as well as reports of migrants moving north toward the border. In the end, it seems, nothing happened.

And therein lies Ceuta’s rather terrifying problem. Spain can spend millions extending walls and deploying police, but preventing another July depends largely on what happens on the Moroccan side of the border. 👀

3. 👮 Why are fake cops kidnapping people in Barcelona?

Barcelona has gone seriously Narcos recently. In broad daylight Saturday afternoon, two cars cut off a third vehicle on the AP-7 highway near Montornès del Vallès. Five men in black, faces covered and wearing police vests, jumped out, dragged a man from the back seat of the third car — bloody-faced, clothes in shreds, shoes still in the car — beat him senseless, and drove off. Other drivers, baffled and scared, filmed the whole thing (the videos went viral, duh). Hours later, the victim turned up bruised but alive in Sant Llorenç Savall. He did not wish to discuss what had happened.

• Three makes a trend. This was the third such incident in Catalonia in less than a month.

It started on Sept. 7 in Gavà. A motorcyclist was riding down Carrer del Pou when occupants of another car opened fire on him, then hauled his wounded body into their trunk and drove away. The Mossos d’Esquadra found him hours later, seriously hurt, abandoned in Sabadell.

• Then came the AP-7 episode — the one that went viral.

And then, barely 48 hours after that, at 2 a.m. on Monday morning, a guy in Barcelona’s Sant Martí de Provençals neighborhood started shouting for help as a group of men forced him into a vehicle. Witnesses called 112 (911 is cooler, IMHO, though 1 + 1 = 2), but the Mossos couldn’t catch the car. He was found hours later, wounded, near Salt (Girona).

The police theory in all three cases is the same. They believe these are ajustes de cuentas — paybacks — between drug trafficking gangs. The AP-7 victim has prior drug convictions and had recently been released from prison; El Español floated the Albanian mafia as a possible actor. Technically, the Mossos (Catalonia’s cops) note, these aren’t even kidnappings because no ransom was demanded, so they’re classified as illegal detention, possibly with the added charge of impersonating public authority. Most of all, they look like ways to send a message.

• The biggest investigative obstacle? The victims won’t talk. And police acknowledge these incidents are crazy underreported. Most score-settling between criminal networks stays inside the gangs — what happens in the mob stays in the mob, right? — and nobody calls 112 (or 911, damnit!).

4. 🤑 Wall Street has decided who it's voting for

Money talks in the U.S., and it’s shouting at Spain. Two events this week drove home which side American money is on in Spanish politics — and no, Mr Handsome, it’s not yours.

• First off, the bad news for the current government. According to Spain’s Secretariat of State for Commerce, U.S. investors have increased the amount of money they’ve taken out of Spain by 386% in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year. As in, they’ve yanked out €3.85bn in just six months.

U.S. money ran away. To put that in perspective, in all of 2025 €4.6bn in U.S. money was “disinvested”, itself a 30-year record. So American money is leaving Spain faster than a tourist fleeing a plate of oreja a la plancha.

• But why? The reasons cited were the Sánchez government’s deteriorating relationship with the Trump administration, and regulatory barriers — particularly restrictions on electricity grid access that are choking off investment in data centers and other cash-money sectors.

Now, the good news. Well, for the PP’s stumble-prone (and dependably boring) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Goldman Sachs this week called Spain a remarkable fiscal “exception.”

• But why (Pt. 2)? They projected that a PP-Vox government after the 2027 elections would cut Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio by five percentage points, to 95%, by 2030 — while debt rises everywhere else. Basically, France, the U.S., the U.K., Italy, and Germany all look like sloppy overspenders in comparison.

• Spain is a good boy. Spain is currently paying 3.9% on its 10-year bonds; France is paying 4.46%. Spain’s Ibex 35 stock index is up 31% over the past year, while France’s CAC 40 is up a measly 4%.

• More Wall Street love for the righties. Nomura piled on, saying markets would greet a PP-Vox coalition “positively,” given its likely focus on deficit reduction and growth-friendly policies.

Not just that they’re on the right — it’s that they’re “stable”. The contrast Goldman draws is that Spain, with a probable clear majority incoming, represents stability. But France, potentially about to hand the presidency to long-time nutter Marine Le Pen — but without a parliamentary majority — represents chaos.

Goldman’s nightmare scenario? It’s that Feijóo falls short of a majority with Vox and Spain gets another messy hung parliament. In that case, they warn, investor confidence in Spain’s fiscal story collapses, and all bets are off.

• Basically, Wall Street has a horse in Spain’s 2027 race. And it’s wearing blue.

5. 🏛️ Now they’ve found a Roman theater under Málaga

That’s right. More archaeology news! (At this point we should start a dedicated newsletter; we’d be rich.)

Turns out there’s still a lot of stuff buried beneath southern Spain, and now archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Singilia Barba (just 7km outside Antequera, Málaga) have uncovered part of a 52-meter-wide Roman theater, and its incredible state of preservation suggests it could rank among the best-kept Roman theaters on the Iberian Peninsula (probably not as cool as Mérida's, but still… Woo!)

• Reality check. OK. Technically, we’ve known it was there for centuries. The theater has been documented since the 16th century, but nobody had actually excavated it. Archaeologists returned to Singilia Barba this year, after more than three decades without major excavations, and finally started digging.

• And they got quite the surprise. The stone blocks making the theater’s seating are in exceptionally good condition; particularly impressive because the upper sections of Roman theaters are normally the first to disappear thanks to collapses, looting and generations of people recycling the stone for other buildings.

Thank all that dirt. Singilia Barba was gradually abandoned and eventually disappeared around the 12th century, leaving much of the ancient city buried, and those enormous quantities of earth effectively turned the theater into a giant archaeological time capsule.

• Here’s the exciting part. They’ve excavated only around 5% of it. If the rest is preserved as well as what they’ve uncovered so far, researchers believe Singilia Barba could be comparable to Roman theaters at Medellín and Regina in Extremadura.

• That 5% is already a lot. Archaeologists have found hairpins indicating the presence of women in the theater, as well as marble imported from places including Greece and modern-day Turkey, evidence of the wealth and far-reaching connections of the people who lived here.

What exactly was Singilia Barba? The important ancient city's history predates the Romans, with evidence of settlement going back to at least the 3rd century BC. Under Rome, it eventually became Municipium Flavium Liberum Singiliense (try saying that quickly) and reached its peak during the Flavian period (Google it, kids!).

• Archaeologists have identified a 350m circus (the Roman kind), houses, cemeteries, and a forum containing temples, smaller shrines, a basilica, and a monumental paved square.

• The people digging it up are a team led by archaeologist Manuel Romero Pérez alongside Complutense University researchers Sergio España Chamorro and Luis Romero Novella, with support from Antequera’s city government.

Researchers are now looking for funding for another excavation campaign next year. With 5% scratched away, they now just need the money to dig up the other 95%.

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🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

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Madrid gets all “big data” on the housing crisis

We're still waiting, with bated breath, for Madrid’s big-eyed, non-blinking presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso to burst out with, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up." But until that happens — and we may be waiting a while — let's talk about her newest proposal to improve the region's surveillance state lack of accessibly priced housing.

There it was — a map. During the Debate of the State of the Region about two weeks ago, tucked at the bottom of the announcement of policies her government would use in its push to develop 70,000 homes with some sort of official protection during this legislature, was the statement that Madrid would “create the first regional map of disused or uninhabited properties” that would allow for the “precise identification of these assets” in order to accelerate their entry into the rental market.

But how would that work? Several articles published this week show how.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And if you’re looking for a palate cleanser after last week’s insipid F1 race, have we got options for you!

• Yes, I understand your frustration. After all, paying €3,000 just to see a couple of cars driving around for a few hours (and by “see,” I mean sensing a colorful blur pass you by a few times for a fraction of a second) is probably not what you had in mind when you decided to spend a significant fraction of your monthly income on it.

• Fear not, peasant! The Bubble is here with more suggestions so you can keep throwing away your money (although this time the experiences should hopefully be more fulfilling).

• First of all, Shakira is in town for her Madrid Europe residency, and her first concert is today. Hurray! (If you have tickets). You also have multiple dance parties, plays, exhibits, and stuff that will leave you exhausted but happy (and poor). Come join us on our lofty quest for infinite hedonism as we bid adieu to the summer of 2026.

Happy weekend!

1. 👠 Madrid Fashion Week is back this weekend

You may have noticed an unusual concentration of extremely well-dressed people wandering around the city this week. That’s because this thing called Madrid Fashion Week is underway, with more than 60 designers, 45 runway shows, exhibitions, performances, and parties turning the city into Europe’s fashion capital through Saturday.

• The main event is Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid (a mouthful), which runs through Sept. 19 and showcases the Spring/Summer 2026–27 collections. And this year, organizers are making a bigger effort to take Fashion Week beyond the traditional IFEMA runway.

But wait… Now you don’t have to go to IFEMA to hang out with top models who barely acknowledge your existence or look at clothes you’ll never wear, even if you had the money to buy them, because… fashion is coming downtown! It’s all part of Madrid’s Semana de la Moda, with shows and events spreading into unusual locations around the city.

• Friday belongs to the big names. Universidad Nebrija hosts Maison Mesa, Custo Barcelona, Lola Casademunt by Maite and Yolancris throughout the day, before Alvarno takes over the Galería de las Colecciones Reales at 7:30 p.m.

• Saturday is for the new kids. The final day is devoted to EGO, MBFWMadrid’s platform for emerging designers, with shows from Apolineo Studio, Biyeyemete, Cotes, Isabel Is My Name, Karla Aguilar and Miss Take at Universidad Nebrija.

And yes, Madrid would very much like to sit at the cool kids’ table. The city’s stated ambition is to strengthen its position alongside established fashion capitals like Paris, Milan, New York and London (who, like the top models do with you, also barely register Madrid’s existence).

So put on something fabulous and pretend you’re supposed to be there. If Emily from Emily in Paris can (somewhat) pull it off, so can you.

👗 What: Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid + Other fashion stuff

📍 Where: IFEMA Madrid (Avenida del Partenon 5, Madrid) + venues across the city

📅 When: Through Sept. 19

🎟️ Tickets start at €95 (belonging is not cheap, peasant)

2. 🎪 Brava and Jardín de las Delicias: Two great music festivals on the same weekend

Apparently Madrid has decided one major music festival a weekend isn’t enough. So now have to pick between two. Both Brava Madrid and Jardín de las Delicias take place Friday and Saturday, which means your choice essentially comes down to this: Are you team Vengaboys, or team Viva Suecia? Choose wisely.

🌈 Brava Madrid Festival: This one’s for the gays and the gay-adjacent (i.e. allies). More than 50,000 people attended last year (it was sold out!), so the festival returns this weekend to Caja Mágica with three areas devoted to hits, pop and electronic music, plus food trucks, fashion and a general commitment from the crowds to being fabulous.

• This lineup is all over the place (and will definitely make you feel old because it’s mostly late 90s and early 00s). You’ve got live performances from the Sugababes (remember them?), Natalie Imbruglia (remember her?), Fangoria, Inna, Vengaboys (Boom, boom, boom, boom… I want you in my room!), Leire Martínez, María Peláe and Soraya, plus an electronic stage featuring Sofía Cristo and a bunch of DJs. Basically, if you want to drunkenly scream along to all these late 20th century international hits, you’ll probably be fine.

🍑 Jardín de las Delicias Festival: You always say you want to be immersed in the local culture, so here’s your chance to ditch the international names and go very, very Spanish.

• Over at the Complutense University campus, this festival is definitely going more local indie/pop-rock with Dani Martín, Viva Suecia (this song is… ❤️), Sexy Zebras, Marlon, Marlena and Inazio.

• It’s also pretty massive. Jardín sold out last year too, drawing more than 55,000 people, and mixes the concerts with visual shows, performances, food, and other activities designed to turn the university grounds into something considerably more exciting than a campus.

So there you have it: two days, two giant festivals, two completely different vibes. Both of them are amazing.

🎤 What: Brava Madrid Festival / Jardín de las Delicias Festival

📍 Where: Caja Mágica / Cantarranas Campus, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 18 & 19

🎟️ Tickets: Brava starts at €40 / Jardín de las Delicias starts at €117.95

3. 🍸 Hotel Tapa Tour: Go bar-hopping through Madrid’s fanciest hotels

You know what? Screw Fashion Week. There’s nothing better than eating and drinking on a weekend. Also, if we’re gonna be judged by pretentious people who think they are better than us, why not do it at a fancy hotel instead? At least there’s food there.

• Welcome to the Hotel Tapa Tour, an event in which Madrid’s luxury hotels remind you that you’re allowed inside even if you can’t afford to sleep there. Back for its 11th edition, it’s turning some of the capital’s fanciest hotels into stops on a very glamorous tapas crawl through Sept. 27.

• The idea is to break down the barrier between luxury hotels and the rest of us. Participating hotels serve special tapas that anyone can drop in and try without a reservation, effectively turning high-end hotel cooking into what organizers call “informal haute cuisine.”

• There are four categories to hunt down: signature croquettes, traditional Spanish tapas, fusion creations, and (because this is a civilized society) dessert tapas, with optional drink pairings at each hotel.

• And these aren’t exactly your neighborhood pensión. Last year’s lineup included the Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental Ritz, The Madrid EDITION, Rosewood Villa Magna, The Palace, JW Marriott, Gran Hotel Inglés and BLESS, among more than 20 participating hotels.

• Want to make an evening of it? Four hotels (Rosewood Villa Magna, JW Marriott, Barceló Torre de Madrid and URSO Hotel & Spa) are also offering guided in-house experiences, where you explore the hotel’s different gastronomic spaces through a four-tapa tasting menu.

Basically, it’s your opportunity to enter those places without getting rejected at the door.

🍴 What: Hotel Tapa Tour Madrid

📍 Where: Participating luxury hotels across Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 17–27

🎟️ Tickets: No general admission or reservation required; tapas and pairings are purchased individually at participating hotels.

4. 📸 Fiebre Photobook: Judge a book by its cover

You know how reading books is no longer a thing? I know, right? Who reads anymore? But if for some weird reason you feel bad about not buying books, I have the perfect answer for you.

• Fiebre Photobook Fest takes over La Casa Encendida this weekend, bringing together photographers, artists, publishers and some extremely pretty books for three days devoted entirely to the art of telling stories through photography.

• This is photobook heaven. The centerpiece is a huge fair featuring more than 130 artists, collectives, publishers, bookstores and distributors from Spain and around the world, including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, France, China, the U.S. and the U.K.

• Mexico gets the spotlight this year, with the festival’s 13th edition paying particular attention to the country’s diverse independent publishing scene and encouraging a more emotional, intuitive approach to photography and the physical book itself.

• There’s plenty to do besides buying beautiful books you’ll be afraid to read touch. The weekend also includes workshops, exhibitions and other activities aimed at everyone from curious newcomers to professional photographers and publishers.

• And apparently photobooks are having a moment. Fiebre has built an online catalog of more than 1,200 publications, while the festival itself has grown to its largest number of participants yet.

Come and buy a coffee table book that’s not TASCHEN, please. You probably already have enough of those.

📸 What: Fiebre Photobook Fest XIII

📍 Where: La Casa Encendida, Ronda de Valencia, 2

📅 When: Sept. 18–20

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission to the fair

5. 🤖 L.E.V. Matadero 2026: Get weird with art and technology

If none of the previous options are your cup of tea, maybe you’re just weird. So I have the perfect event for you!

• The L.E.V. Festival returns for its eighth Madrid edition this weekend, bringing together electronic music, digital art, robots, experimental cinema and extended reality for four days devoted to what happens when humans and technology get creatively tangled up (spoiler alert: the robots kill us all)

• This isn’t just an electronic music festival. L.E.V. combines live concerts, audiovisual performances, immersive installations, stage shows and XR experiences, with artists exploring everything from artificial intelligence to virtual worlds.

• There are some pretty big names involved. The festival opened Thursday with the Spanish premiere of Last and First Men, a stage adaptation of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s experimental sci-fi film featuring Tilda Swinton’s voice, contemporary dance, 16mm film and Jóhannsson’s rather haunting music.

• Saturday gets particularly trippy. Italian duo Schnitt joins Japanese calligrapher Aoi Yamaguchi for Calligraton, turning traditional Japanese shodō calligraphy into a live audiovisual performance, while Swiss artist Milian Mori brings an electronic show filled with stroboscopic visuals.

• Sunday ends with pianos and robots. New York composer Kelly Moran performs music from Don’t Trust Mirrors, mixing prepared piano with synthesizers, before Japanese artist NAO closes things out with the Spanish premiere of THE CLUSTERs, combining dance, robotics, sound and real-time visuals.

Not a bad option for those of us who understand that the rise of the machines is now inevitable.

🤖 What: L.E.V. Matadero

📍 Where: Matadero Madrid, Plaza de Legazpi, 8

📅 When: Sept. 17–20

🎟️ Tickets: Check website

📺 What to watch if you don’t want to leave the couch this weekend…

📺 Movie: Wolfgang | 2025

📍Where to watch: HBO Max

❓What’s it about: A struggling actor suddenly has to raise his estranged 10-year-old son, an autistic piano prodigy with an IQ of 150, after the boy’s mother dies.

🤩 Why you should watch: Because it takes a potentially common premise and handles it with considerably more intelligence and restraint than the typical family comedy. Director Javier Ruiz Caldera mixes humor with genuinely complicated subjects, including grief, depression, autism, parenthood, and insecurity, while classical music gives the story much of its emotional weight.

💬 English Subtitles: Yes (movie is in Catalan)

💃🏻 Places to try this weekend…

🍝 Florentine: La dolce vita lands on Serrano

What’s it about: Madrid has a new rooftop Italian restaurant, and this one comes with Salamanca views and a healthy dose of 1970s Italian glamour. Florentine has taken over the seventh floor of WOW Concept on Calle Serrano after opening its first Spanish location in Marbella.

Why you should go: Because the menu leans heavily into indulgent Italian crowd-pleasers: carbonara finished tableside, slow-fermented Neapolitan pizza and profiteroles covered in hot chocolate, alongside vitello tonnato, tuna tartare and a spicy nduja-and-stracciatella pizza.

Bottom line: At around €50 per person, Florentine isn't cheap, but neither is pretending you’re spending the evening in 1970s Milan.

📍 Address: Calle de Serrano 52, Madrid.

☕ Lhardy gets a sequel (yup, we’re splurging this week)

What’s it about: After 187 years in a single location, Madrid institution Lhardy has opened a second outpost on Calle de Velázquez, beneath the Wellington Hotel. Lhardy Café is a more casual, all-day version of the 1839 original, open from breakfast through late-night drinks.

Why you should go: The café mixes original Lhardy pieces with the atmosphere of an old-school European café, while bringing over classics including its consommé, croquettes and soufflé. The famous cocido, however, remains exclusive to the original.

Bottom line: A more relaxed way to experience one of Madrid’s great culinary institutions without pretending something opened in 2026 has been there since 1839.

Address: Calle de Velázquez 8, Madrid

👨🏻‍💻 Viral Videos of the Week

⚫️ Watch the moment Los Javis found out their movie La Bola Negra would be representing Spain at the Oscars

🚨 Cops kick out kids watching F1 race from bridge, then stay to watch the race themselves

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🇪🇺 The Ceuta crisis goes European

Oh boy! The whole Ceuta migrant “invasion” really isn’t just a Spanish issue anymore. Seven weeks later, the irregular arrival of some 70,000 aspiring immigrants into the Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa has made its way to the heart of the European Union. And you know what it did there? It blew up.

• Someone important is not happy. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament this week to propose a new framework that would let EU member states temporarily suspend the bloc’s asylum rules in migration emergencies.

• The catalyst, she made clear, was Ceuta. “The border of Ceuta is a European border,” VDL declared, with great solemnity, “because Ceuta is Spain, Ceuta is Europe — and Europe is there for you.”

This is a bigger deal than it might sound. The EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact only entered into force in July, and VDL is already proposing an escape hatch from it. The new “emergency response framework” would let member states hit pause on asylum procedures to speed up deportations when things get out of hand.

• Does VDL blame Morocco? She blamed trafficking mafias and unnamed EU “adversaries” for weaponizing vulnerable migrants against European borders — a reference to Russia and Belarus, who pulled exactly this stunt on the Polish and Lithuanian borders a few years back.

• The implication was that Ceuta wasn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It was, at least in part, a geopolitical attack. She didn't blame Morocco (conspicuously), though VDL is part of the same political family as the PP, which blames center-left PM Pedro Sánchez — and Morocco — for the incursion.

Meanwhile, in Madrid… Sánchez and PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo are accusing each other of deliberately keeping the crisis alive (as you can see, nothing’s changed).

• Feijóo says Morocco has offered to take migrants back and accuses Sánchez of “chronicling” the crisis by failing to process and return them quickly enough.

• Sánchez threw the accusation straight back. He says the PP has floated breaking or suspending parts of the EU’s relationship with Morocco, but Morocco is precisely the country Spain needs to cooperate with to return the migrants. In Sánchez’s telling, blowing up that relationship wouldn’t solve Ceuta — it would make solving it harder.

Still stuck. In Ceuta, the regional government estimates that around 13,000 irregular migrants remain, although even the national government acknowledges nobody knows the exact number.

International whodunnit. The investigation into how this happened is getting serious, and the crisis has already claimed its first political victim: Gonzalo Sanz, chief of staff to the government’s representative in Ceuta, resigned after a spectacular dispute with his boss, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano.

• Whoopsie! An officer of the CNI (Spain’s intelligence agency) had warned Sanz on July 29 about social-media calls for a mass crossing the following day. Sanz says he passed the warning on. But Pérez Triano says he didn’t (or that they were “informal warnings” at best).

• Nacional Court judge María Tardón now wants to hear it from Sanz herself. She’s summoned him to testify on Oct. 1, while Ceuta's regional president Juan Jesús Vivas will testify the day before about what authorities knew and why the response collapsed.

The Ceuta crisis even found its way onto the fútbol pitch. Several La Liga clubs — Villarreal, Betis, Elche, and Real Madrid — joined a solidarity campaign called “Todos Somos Caballas” (”We Are All Ceutans”), wearing t-shirts with the slogan before matches.

• But then… Three Real Madrid players — Vinicius, Mbappé and Konaté — walked out on the pitch with the shirts half-folded, flashed them for approximately one second, and yanked them off. They gave no public explanation, but the club acknowledged their players have “personal sensitivities” about a campaign that some see as cover for anti-immigrant sentiment. (Mbappé later said, “I stand in full solidarity with Ceuta… But I also wanted to offer a gesture and a thought for all the migrants who have lost their lives..)

• Angry face 😡! The right-leaning El Mundo was predictably incandescent and called it “treason,” demanded the three be expelled from the club immediately, and blamed “sanchismo.” Because Sánchez is apparently all-powerful, even though he can’t pass a law or budget to save his life.

Ay, por dios…

More news below. 👇👇

Are you an American living in Spain? You can vote in U.S. elections from here! If you’re an eligible U.S. citizen, request your ballot now at VoteFromAbroad.org and choose to receive it by email. Once it arrives, complete and return it promptly, following your state’s instructions and deadlines. Need help? The website offers state-by-state guidance and support from voter assistance volunteers. Request your ballot here.

🎙️ Episode 5 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

On our latest episode (recorded right before the Ceuta crisis), we discuss immigration, belonging, and identity in Spain with writer Noor Ammar Lamarty, ask whether the PP is moving closer to Vox ahead of the next election, and explore the TV shows, from Verano Azul to Sálvame, that help explain Spanish society.

Subscribe and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🏎️ Madrid’s F1 comeback was a huge success! (Except for the race, which sucked)

Formula 1 returned to Madrid after 45 years last weekend, and by almost every measure the inaugural race at the new Madring (the Madrid ring, geddit?) was a success: packed stands, hundreds of thousands of visitors, non-stop press coverage and a massive economic boost for the capital. It all went great, except for one teeny, tiny, enormous problem: the actual race was incredibly boring.

• First, the positive. Around 350,000 people attended (wow!) over the three-day weekend, with tickets sold out and hotel prices nearly 70% higher than during the same period last year.

• Money, money, money. A PwC study commissioned before the race estimated that, after a €481.5m investment, it would generate €467m in economic activity, nearly 8,850 jobs and €83m in taxes and social security contributions (and this is just for the first year).

• First of many. Madring has a 10-year contract running through 2035, making this a pretty big comeback for the capital.

But then, the race. Kimi Antonelli won the historic first race at Madring. Good for him. However, watching cars drive around in a line is apparently boring af.

• Like watching paint dry. Sports media quickly moved to destroy the race, which produced only four overtakes in total (apparently that’s bad, not that we know). Even Monaco (basically the poster child for dull F1 races where nobody can pass anybody) managed 10 this year.

• Madring’s tracks make it extremely difficult for a driver to pull alongside another and attack. Lando Norris (no f*cks given) elegantly said: “I don’t know how someone looks at this design and goes, 'Mint!’” Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto said he “almost fell asleep” at the wheel. Yikes.

• But fear not, F1 fan with disposable income! It seems much of the circuit is temporary, and organizers have already said they’re open to modifications before next year’s race.

Now add a little politics. Transport Minister and professional X (nee Twitter) troll Óscar Puente called the Grand Prix an “absolute turd dud,” and Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso was not amused.

• No, you! She said the event was a “total success” and accused Sánchez’s government of doing “everything possible to tarnish” the event because Madrid organized it.

Both things (a successful dud) can be true at the same time.

2. 😥 A Spanish exchange student is murdered in Mexico

It’s a parent’s greatest nightmare. Claudia Tacoronte, a 21-year-old from the Canary Islands who was studying childhood education at the University of Granada, was stabbed to death — apparently by a stranger — outside of the cultural center in Cuautla, in the Mexican state of Morelos.

• Claudia had been in Mexico barely three weeks. On Saturday evening she traveled from Cuernavaca, where she was studying at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), to attend a medicinal plants fair in Cuautla, 50 km away. Around 8:30 p.m., a man tried to snatch her phone. She ran. He chased her inside the building and stabbed her multiple times. The ambulance took half an hour to arrive, and she was already gone.

Paco is the main suspect. Security cameras caught a man in a white Under Armour shirt and dark backpack fleeing the scene at 8:50 p.m. Neighbors identified him as “Paco,” a local thief who had been caught on camera stealing a bicycle the same day. He remains at large. The Morelos prosecutor’s office is investigating under a femicide protocol, though robbery remains the leading hypothesis.

Why no warning? Claudia’s sister posted a video that has been viewed more than half a million times, asking a question that has reverberated across Spain: why did no one warn Claudia or her family that three other students from the same university had been murdered in the previous seven months?

• Claudia was more than this. In a follow-up message, she asked that Claudia not be reduced to a headline: “I don’t want us to remember Claudia simply as ‘the 21-year-old girl who was murdered in Mexico.’ I want this to mean something.”

Troubling history. Morelos has the second-highest femicide rate in Mexico. In the country as a whole, 1,250 women were murdered in the first seven months of 2026. The University of Granada has cancelled its exchange program with UAEM. Meanwhile, “Paco” is still out there.

3. 🤡 A Killer Klown is terrorizing Madrid! (Allegedly)

We knew we had it too good. We returned from fantastic vacations just as Madrid’s weather slid into gorgeous autumn. And then, boom 💥, a murder-happy clown began to terrorize our fair city. That’s how they get you, right?

• It began about a week ago, in the suburb of Rivas Vaciamadrid (pop. 103,000). TikTok and WhatsApp groups blew up with reports of a killer clown prowling parks at night, chasing women and girls with a baseball bat, and also, apparently, hurling bottles at youths, because if you’re going to be a killer clown, you gotta go all the way.

• The photos and videos? They went viral, natch, as media outlets reported it as real, and vigilante groups organized nighttime car patrols to hunt the clown down. Yes, really.

We are sad to break this to you. The Guardia Civil and Policía Local investigated, reviewed security camera footage, and interviewed every person who called in a sighting.

• The conclusion? The clown (aka Pennywise or maybe Penique Listo?), with his red afro and blue-and-yellow parachute suit, does not exist, the police claim (though maybe they’re just trying to calm us down… 🤔)

• Please tell us you’re kidding. Nope! The photos show incoherent shadows, unrealistic proportions, and other signs of A.I. slop. Of the five calls received, all turned out to be false alarms — people reporting what they’d been told, not what they’d seen. Shocker!

When Killer Klowns are involved, politics can’t be far behind. The local PP spokesperson, Janette Novo, posted a video with epic background music demanding the IU (communist) leaders of town hall take the clown “seriously” (you know how lazy communists are about clown safety).

• The video? Mejor imposible. It opened with an image of the nonexistent clown while asking people not to share unverified images of the nonexistent clown. A constituent replied: “You’re asking people not to spread nonsense while spreading nonsense.”

• Fine, I exaggerated. Once the authorities debunked the whole thing, Novo graciously acknowledged her error with a post declaring: “Case closed: the only clowns in Rivas are IU.” #ffs 🤦

Police are now tracking down whoever started it. Fabricating crimes carries a fine of 6-12 months’ salary, and deliberately spreading false content to cause public alarm can mean 3 months to a year in prison. Wearing a clown suit while carrying a baseball bat? Totally cool (At least he’s not ripping little kids’ arms off from the sewers.)

Killer Klown sightings have a blue-blooded genealogy. The phenomenon likely began in Greenville, S.C. (USA) in August 2016, with the original killer clown scare, before it went global, fed by Stephen King’s It and basic human fear of clowns (which is natural).

• But clown fear goes back further. The 1988 cult hit Killer Klowns from Outer Space stoked our fears with the tale of evil clown-like extraterrestrials that invade a small town to capture, kill, and eat the human inhabitants. True story!

4. 🐑 Let us celebrate a shepherd from another era

Marina Vilalta died on Monday. You may not know her — okay, let’s be honest, you don’t — but she had an amazing life. She died at age 99 in Bruguera (Girona), still working as a shepherd, a job she’d done since age 5, making her the oldest and longest-working active shepherd in Catalonia — and almost certainly in Spain. Here’s her story.

• Vilalta was born in 1927, one of 12 siblings, and the only one who chose the mountains. She began shepherding alongside her father. There was one brief detour — a few months in a textile factory — which she abandoned because, she said, she wanted to see the stars. She spent the next nine decades doing exactly that, taking her flock of sheep and goats out each afternoon to graze at the foot of Mount Taga, returning when the light faded.

Vilalta never learned to read or write. Instead, she carried inside her a vast store of Catalan songs, refranes and oral tradition, all of it memorized with extraordinary precision. (There was a book written about her, though: Journo Abraham Orriols penned the book, Una vida a les muntanyes, when he was 26 and she was 96.)

• In 2022 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi, Catalonia’s highest civilian honor. She declined to go to Barcelona to collect it. Someone had to watch the flock, you know? So the region’s then-president Pere Aragonès traveled to Bruguera to present it to her in person. She addressed him informally, with tu. Her family still tells the story, half-amused, half-scandalized.

Vilalta has an epitaph of sorts, which she dictated herself. “I never thought I’d live to be this old. One day God will call me, and that’ll be it. And when I die... screw the living!“ In celebration of her life, current Catalan president Salvador Illa called her an example of the pagesia catalana (Catalan peasantry), and her biographer Orriols posted a photo of the two of them sharing a vermouth in the village bar — taken two weeks before she died.

• Last Tuesday she went out to pasture, as she did every day. She felt unwell. An ambulance came. Caring for the sheep and goats was the last thing she did.

5. 🦕 A Diplodocus turned up in Teruel. It shouldn’t be there.

[Ed. note: We swear it’s not our goal to write about nerdy exciting archaeological findings each week, but it’s not our fault that Spain is lately killing it in that department.]

Cue the Jurassic Park theme, because this is big news (literally)! For almost 150 years, Diplodocus — an enormous, long-necked veggie-saurus that could stretch 25 meters from head to tail — had been an exclusively American dinosaur.

• ¡Teruel también existe! Now paleontologists have identified 14 exceptionally well-preserved tail vertebrae and several chevrons that confirm that one of them was wandering around what is now Teruel 150 million years ago.

• Big deal. This is the first confirmed Diplodocus ever found outside the region and one of the most complete diplodocid skeletons ever discovered in Europe.

News, but not really. The fossils were actually excavated back in 2008 at La Tejería, near the village of El Castellar in Teruel. Researchers have spent the years since studying the bones and trying to establish exactly what animal they belonged to. Because at first they couldn't believe it was a Diplodocus.

Why is this such a big deal? Because unless aliens teleported it, there was no way it could have travelled all the way here. As in, it must have lived here. The discovery provides unusually strong evidence that dinosaur populations were moving between what would eventually become North America and Europe during the Late Jurassic.

• And they may have literally walked between them. Back when Pangea was a thing (Google it, kids!), the Atlantic Ocean as we know it didn’t yet exist, and the continents were barely separated by water. Researchers believe periods of lower sea level may have temporarily exposed land bridges, islands, and corridors that allowed enormous animals to migrate between the two sides.

Teruel was apparently quite the dinosaur neighborhood. Fossils from sauropods (think of them as big cows), meat-eating theropods (the mean-looking birds), stegosaurs (those are cute), and ornithopods (not as cute) have all been found in the region.

• Even better news. You can actually go see him/her/them! The fossils are now on display in the dinosaur hall of the Museo Aragonés de Paleontología at Dinópolis in Teruel. Tell the bones we say hi!

🔔 Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!

If you’re not following us on Instagram yet, you’re missing out. We’re posting exclusive content with our collaborators across Spain, breaking news updates, and pop culture coverage. Click on the post above and come hang with us!

🙏 Once again, please remember to share this newsletter with your friends on social media. The more we grow, the more information we’ll be able to offer each week.

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🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

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Madrid, we have a problem

Are you up for something different? This week, as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is being raked over the coals (at least in the media), for engaging in supposed housing vaporware — announcing tons of new housing but not actually, um, building it — I thought it might be useful (and interesting!) to step back and ask the big questions: How many homes does Spain really need? Where? And how confident should we be in any of the answers?

The numbers, such as they are, paint a stark picture. Since 2021, Spain has formed 1.2m new households — a mix of people striking out on their own, starting families, or arriving from abroad. Over that same period, only 474,000 new homes were completed. Do the math, and you get a deficit somewhere north of 730,000 homes, depending on who you ask. CaixaBank Research puts it at 734,000. The Bank of Spain says 750,000. OBS Business School lands at 740,000. The differences are marginal.

As for the scale of what’s needed, choose your own nightmare. CaixaBank Research calculates that Spain would need to produce around 330,000 homes annually over the next five years to absorb the existing deficit — roughly quadrupling the current completion rate. (Spain completed 102,000 in 2024, its best year in over a decade. ) Or look at it this way: Spain currently starts just 2.7 new homes for every 1,000 residents. Before the 2008 financial crisis, that number was nearly 20 per 1,000. The gap between where Spain is and where it needs to be is a canyon.

Let us count the ways:

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And I have good news and bad news.

• The good news? Madrid’s social life is back in full force, and the city’s agenda is packed with amazing things to do, which means if you want to have fun, you no longer have to travel outside of the city to some town with a name you can’t pronounce.

• The bad news? Many of the things are related to the F1 Grand Prix. It’s OK if you like it. No one (except for me) is judging here. And to be fair, Madrid hasn’t had an F1 race in over 40 years, so if that makes you happy, go for it. You do you; I’ll be at some art gallery in Chueca appreciating homoerotic art with a glass of Rioja. Chin, chin!

Happy weekend!

1. 🏁 After four decades, Formula 1 comes roaring back to Madrid

Attention, straight men (and probably others, although mostly straight men)! For the first time in more than 40 years, Formula 1 is racing in Madrid again. From Friday through Sunday, the city is hosting the Spanish Grand Prix at MADRING, the completely new circuit built around IFEMA and Valdebebas; and this isn’t a one-off: Madrid has signed up to host the race every year through 2035.

• The new circuit is 5.47 km long, with 22 turns, and organizers say the qualifying laps will average around 213 km/h, which apparently is, like, really fast.

• Its big showpiece is La Monumental, a banked curve that’s already become the circuit’s visual trademark, for some reason. Around 110,000 people are expected for the first edition, eventually rising to more than 140,000 as MADRING expands.

• Unlike most F1 circuits, you can get there by Metro, train, or bus. Because don’t forget: even though the cheapest tickets are like €300, this is an event for the people.

• Also, here’s some good news if you’re a pleb you don’t have a ticket: Madrid has basically turned itself into one enormous F1 fan zone! Williams has taken over Callao with historic cars, professional racing simulators, games, and an F1 replica; Audi’s La Monumental experience in Plaza de Colón has original racing cars and a real Formula 1 car perched on a recreation of MADRING’s signature curve; and Alpine has brought three cars (including a full-size F1 replica) to the corner of Alcalá and Gran Vía.

• You can all finally fulfill your dreams of taking a photo in front of one of these cars while leaning on the hood, thumb up, so you can post it on Tinder and impress all the ladies who’ll ask, “Oh, wow, do you own that?” You know… like this.

• And save Puerta del Sol for after dark. Tonight and tomorrow, the Real Casa de Correos becomes the canvas for an F1-themed videomapping show from 9:30 p.m. until midnight, combining Madrid history with Formula 1 and culminating with the sport’s famous five red starting lights spreading across the façade.

There are F1 installations on Serrano too (at the TAG Heuer store), so even if you couldn’t care less who gets pole position on Saturday, Formula 1 is going to be pretty difficult to avoid this weekend.

Surrender to the power of the vroom vroom.

🏎️ What: Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix + events

📍 Where: MADRING + multiple locations around Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 11–13

🎟️ Tickets: Race tickets start at €605 (💀). Events are free.

2. 🎤 Pop superstar Aitana takes over the Movistar Arena

If you need a palate cleanser after the previous post, here’s a pretty gay recommendation to balance things out. Aitana, one of Spain’s biggest pop stars, is basically moving into the Movistar Arena this weekend and is bringing her Cuarto Azul World Tour to Madrid for four shows, giving you two chances to catch her this weekend (and another two if your weekend somehow extends into Tuesday).

• If her name rings a bell, it may be because of her megahit Superestrella, which became Spain’s unofficial anthem during the World Cup. The song got so big that, when Spain won the tournament, Aitana ended up performing it live at the Disney-esque victory celebrations in Cibeles with members of the national team dancing alongside her. Remember? It was all pretty High School Musical.

• Still don’t know her? Shame on you. Aitana first became famous as the runner-up on Operación Triunfo in 2017 and has since gone from reality-show discovery to one of Spain’s biggest female pop stars.

• Her catalog now stretches from early hits like Teléfono and Vas a quedarte through the 2000s-inspired pop-rock of 11 Razones and the dance-pop era of Alpha, including Los Ángeles and the gloriously catchy Las Babys.

• This tour is built around her fourth album, Cuarto azul, with newer tracks including Segundo intento, Superestrella (obvi), Sentimiento natural, and 6 de febrero, alongside the songs that made her famous.

The album has also picked up two Latin Grammy nominations, including Best Contemporary Pop Album. So yeah, she’s BIG. And don’t forget it.

🎤 What: Aitana - Cuarto Azul World Tour

📍 Where: Movistar Arena, Avenida de Felipe II s/n, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 11, 12, 14 & 15

🎟️ Tickets start at €55.

3. 🖼️ Go gallery hopping across Madrid with the 17th Edition of Apertura

Oh, are car racing and bubblegum pop too low-brow for you? Worry not, my fellow ascot-wearing snob, because Madrid’s art world is finally waking up from its summer slumber (about damn time, tbh).

• More than 60 galleries across the region are opening new exhibitions simultaneously for the 17th edition of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, essentially turning the city into one enormous contemporary art crawl.

• Organized by Arte Madrid, the idea is refreshingly accessible. Galleries extend their opening hours and throw open their doors so you can wander in and see what’s happening in Madrid’s contemporary art scene without needing to be a collector (or pretending you understand what you’re seeing).

• And this is a genuinely big event on the international gallery circuit. Organizers say Madrid’s Gallery Weekend now ranks second only to Berlin’s in visitor numbers. (Fancy!)

• There’s more going on than simply walking into galleries. Fundación ARCO is bringing back its ARCO GalleryWalks, with guided routes connecting participating spaces around the city. There’s also an open-air sculpture exhibition at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, alongside dozens of individual exhibitions opening across Madrid.

• This year’s edition puts a particular emphasis on Latin American art and Madrid’s growing role as a bridge between Latin American artists and the European art market, with international curators, collectors and cultural institutions descending on the city for the weekend.

In other words, it’s probably the best weekend of the year to walk into all those intimidatingly minimalist galleries you’ve passed a hundred times and never quite dared enter because the owner will probably judge you.

🖼️ What: Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend

📍 Where: Multiple locations around Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 10–13

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission

4. 🎪 Lo que el cuerpo sabe: See what the next generation of circus looks like

Wait! It’s not what you think. Forget clowns and elephants. This is circus as contemporary performance art (so it’s high-brow circus!). The Teatro Circo Price hosts the latest creation from Proyecto CRECE, bringing together young performers who have recently graduated from some of the world’s leading circus schools.

• The show still has everything you’d expect from a circus (acrobatics and balancing acts), but director Marilén Ribot mixes them with theater and dance to create something considerably more intimate. Also, no terrifying clowns.

• The premise is that our bodies can hold memories and emotions that our minds haven’t quite figured out how to express (I think my childhood trauma expresses itself through crippling anxiety, but what do I know), so the performers use everything from spectacular physical feats to tiny gestures and embraces to tell their stories (probably better than anxiety).

• And the performers really are the point here. CRECE is an international laboratory for emerging circus artists, organized by Madrid’s Escuela de Circo Carampa, which brings young graduates together for several weeks to experiment with new ways of combining circus with other performing arts.

After 17 editions, it’s become a showcase for what happens when ridiculously talented young people are given permission to rethink what a circus performance can actually be.

🎪 What: Lo Que el Cuerpo Sabe

📍 Where: Teatro Circo Price, Ronda de Atocha 35, Madrid

📅 When: Through Sept. 12

🎟️ Tickets: €14

5. 📚 Back to the Book Festival: Go book shopping with Madrid’s indie publishers

If your bookshelves somehow still have room (lol, who are we kidding, you don’t even have bookshelves), Matadero Madrid is about to make that problem go away. Back to the Book returns to Casa del Lector this weekend, bringing together independent publishers, writers and readers for three days dedicated to books that can’t be found at FNAC.

• The idea is basically an alternative, slightly more relaxed version of the traditional book fair. Independent publishers set up shop with their latest releases, but you can also spend the weekend jumping between author talks, signings, workshops, live radio and podcasts; and there will be specialty coffee and beer (what’s the point of going if not?), which seems like a perfectly reasonable way to encourage literary purchases.

• And there are some pretty big names on the program. Singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas will talk about and sign her first book, Norteña. Memorias del comienzo, this afternoon; graphic novelist Paco Roca presents his new book El viaje on Saturday.

• The weekend also features writers including Sara Torres, Mónica Ojeda, Pilar Adón, Marta Sanz, Brenda Navarro and Jente Posthuma. Most talks are free, although some offer priority access with advance registration.

The program is pretty niche, too. You can hear PUTOCHINOMARICÓN discuss hyperpop, queer utopias, and internet culture, join a tour exploring the secret history of Matadero, learn how to bind your own hardcover book, attend a talk about human creativity in the age of AI, or finish Sunday with a literary beer tasting pairing texts with three different beers (apparently that’s a thing)

📚 What: Back to the Book Festival

📍 Where: Casa del Lector, Matadero Madrid, Paseo de la Chopera 14, Madrid

📅 When: Friday to Sunday, check website for opening hours

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission

BONUS: 🍑 La tentación vive en Mad: Give in to temptation in Chueca

OK, I lied: This was the gay(ish) recommendation. If Carlos Sainz Jr. the Formula 1 cars aren’t providing quite enough eye candy this weekend, Chueca has an alternative.

• Mad is Mad gallery is saying goodbye to La tentación vive en Mad, an exhibition dedicated rather unapologetically to the beauty, sensuality and desirability of the male body.

• The show brings together seven artists from Madrid, Cádiz, Vitoria, Lisbon, New York and Ukraine, approaching the male form through painting, photography and other visual work that ranges from tender and delicate to provocative and deliberately erotic.

• The gallery’s invitation is simple: embrace your inner voyeur and stop pretending you’re only looking at the brushwork.

• Mad is Mad has been part of Chueca for 20 years, and the exhibition was originally conceived around Madrid Pride and its celebration of sexual freedom and LGBTQ+ visibility.

Saturday is your last chance to see it, with the gallery throwing a three-hour closing party before temptation officially leaves Mad.

🍑 What: La tentación vive en Mad closing party

📍 Where: Mad is Mad, Calle de Pelayo, 48, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 12, 6–9 p.m.

🎟️ Tickets: Free admission

📺 What to watch if you don’t want to leave the couch this weekend…

📺 TV Series: The New Years (Los Años Nuevos) | 2024

📍Where to watch: Movistar+

❓What’s it about: Oscar, stuck with a crappy medical contract, is still hooked on his ex. Ana, without a partner or a job, feels lost and plans to move away. Over the next ten years, they will have to face the passage of time and the decisions they make.

🤩 Why you should watch: Because it takes a brilliantly simple idea (10 episodes, 10 New Year’s Eves across 10 years of the same relationship) and uses it to show how love changes through all the funny and occasionally devastating moments that normally get skipped over in romantic fiction. It’s Spain’s answer to Richard Linklater and probably not the series to watch with your partner if your relationship is already going through a rough patch.

💬 English Subtitles: No.

💃🏻 Places to try this weekend…

🇦🇷 Sorry, Milei! Perón Perón in Malasaña is pretty awesome

What’s it about: Perón Perón is one of Buenos Aires’ most unusual restaurant concepts. Its location in Malasaña is the first outside Argentina. The food is unapologetically Argentine (fried empanadas, choripán, stuffed provoleta, milanesas, bife de chorizo, pastel de papas and chocotorta) while the dining room goes all-in on Peronist history.

Why you should go: Because this Madrid kitchen was trained by the restaurant’s Buenos Aires chef to reproduce the original menu. Dishes have hilarious, over-the-top Peronist names like La Gloriosa and Dos Potencias se Saludan. Plus, they have malbec.

Bottom line: Proper Argentine comfort food inside what is pretty much a Peronist theme park in Malasaña.

📍 Address: Calle del Pez, 6, Malasaña, Madrid.

☕ Cuatro Cafecito: A cozy coffee shop in Chueca

What’s it about: Cuatro Cafecito is a small, family-inspired café on Calle de la Libertad built around specialty coffee, homemade sweets, and a warm, neighborhood feel. The menu keeps things simple: espresso, cortado, flat whites, flavored lattes and matcha, alongside iced drinks and freshly squeezed orange juice.

Why you should go: Because sometimes you don't need an elaborate brunch menu - you just want a good coffee and something homemade to go with it. Here, that means budín, gooey brownies and cookies, with coffee starting at €2.50 and nothing on the drinks menu going above €4.50.

Bottom line: A sweet, affordable neighborhood coffee spot in Chueca for specialty coffee, matcha and homemade treats, and another very good excuse to say cafecito instead of coffee.

Address: Calle de las Infantas 9, Madrid

👨🏻‍💻 Viral Memes of the Week

🖕Desigual’s campaign featuring Elon Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson has won the internet

😡 Angry woman confronts Raphinha, who turns out not to be Raphinha

🔔 Don’t forget to follow us on TikTok!

@thebubblecomOkay, let’s start a fight… 🍿 @Marti Buckley #spain #spanishfood #food #croquetas #lifeinspain

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👨‍🎓 The OECD says Spain's students are stoopid

That’s gonna leave a (bad) mark! A week after we told you about Catalan education officials fired or placed under investigation for gaming the PISA exam — the OECD’s global education study of 15-year-olds — and rendering the region’s results invalid, Spain’s national scores landed. The verdict: Spain’s worst PISA results ever, igniting a blame game of epic proportions. Let’s get into it.

• What the hell happened? Spain scored 451 in reading, 457 in math, and 477 in science — historic lows in all three, all below OECD averages. Since the OECD benchmarks 20 points as roughly one school year, Spain’s 23-point reading drop since 2022 means kids effectively lost a full academic year.

• It doesn’t get better with time. Zoom out a decade, and it’s grimmer. Since Spain’s all-time highs in 2015, students have shed 45 points in reading, 29 in math, and 16 in science — that’s two-plus lost school years in reading, which stands in for critical thinking on the PISA. A third of students can’t clear basic reading or math benchmarks. Only 2% are excellent readers. Grim. 🤮

Some kids are worse off than others. Valencia collapsed 58 points in reading, nearly three school years, and the Basque Country fell 47. Every region fell in every subject, save for Castilla-La Mancha, in science.

• Bright spots not so bright. Even the relative bright spots of Madrid, Asturias, and Castilla y León all still dropped sharply. Catalonia’s results, meanwhile, are excluded from the official international rankings entirely, given that it excluded 23% of the students who were meant to take the test.

The context. A few things happened between Spain’s 2015 peak and its 2025 nadir.

• COVID. A pandemic hit when these students were 10 or 11, at precisely the moment they were transitioning from learning to read to reading to learn. Which left a mark, as anyone who had kids then (or was a kid then) knows.

• Antisocial media. Social media and smartphones became universal, giving kids such a short attention span that many students now struggle with texts over 400 words; “hasty readers” who answer quickly and incorrectly jumped from 7% to 11% OECD-wide, and reading for pleasure has been declining since 2009.

• Classrooms got harder. Immigrant students, who often need extra help, are up 64% in Spain since 2018; bullying rose; and 49% of school heads report teacher shortages, 10 points above the OECD average. Also, in 2020, Spain passed a new education law, called the LOMLOE or “Ley Celaá”, which shifted curriculum emphasis from content mastery toward softer competency frameworks.

The fallout. No one wants to be the politician who made their country’s students dumber, so fingers were pointed. Lots of them.

• The left. The government and left-leaning papers that support it, like El País and El Diario, point to screens. OECD analyst Tue Halgreen gave them cover by noting that the global decline correlates with device use, not specific policies. (And Spain is doing something about that: 86% of Spanish schools already ban phones vs. 49% OECD-wide.)

• The right. The opposition PP and papers like El Español tell a different story. They chest-beat that Spain’s best-ever PISA scores came in 2015, under the PP’s rival LOMCE law — more content-focused (i.e. memorize and regurgitate), with end-of-stage national exams that “concentrated minds,” as former Education Minister Wert (the law’s author) put it. Researcher José Manuel Lacasa of the Instituto F de Investigación Educativa (right-leaning) notes that the worst collapses were posted by Valencia and the Basque Country — the regions, along with Catalonia, that adopted LOMLOE-style policies earliest. “The worst is yet to come,” he told ABC. (Not surprisingly, Spain's secretary of state of education Abelardo de la Rosa flatly rejected any link to the LOMLOE: “The decline is so general it must be considered in context.”)

• The language thing. Some analysts also point to linguistic immersion policies in the Basque Country and Catalonia — where students are tested primarily in Basque or Catalan rather than Castilian Spanish, which is the home language to many — as a compounding factor (critics suggest Catalonia excluded students who weren’t native Catalan speakers to boost its scores). The left disputes the extent.

At least it’s not just us! The OECD warned that the “continued drop” in scores is a global problem, not a uniquely Spanish one. But Spain’s scores are falling faster than the OECD average — and the 10-year trend is one of the worst in the developed world. 😬

More news below. 👇👇

🎙️ Episode 5 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

On our latest episode (recorded right before the Ceuta crisis), we discuss immigration, belonging, and identity in Spain with writer Noor Ammar Lamarty, ask whether the PP is moving closer to Vox ahead of the next election, and explore the TV shows, from Verano Azul to Sálvame, that help explain Spanish society.

Subscribe and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 💣 Everyone except Sánchez thinks Morocco was behind Ceuta

Parliament is back, and Sánchez returned to the floor last Thursday to address one of the biggest crises in Spain’s recent history: Ceuta. More than a month after around 72,000 migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave over two days, leaving 141 dead, the PM gave MPs his account and found himself isolated over one question: was Morocco behind it?

• Sánchez says there still isn’t any “solid evidence”. He also insisted the government received no warning predicting a crisis on this scale.

• We'll be transparent now. He also promised to publish the intelligence reports surrounding the crisis and demanded explanations over why a separate police report (prepared for an Audiencia Nacional judge and pointing to Moroccan involvement) wasn’t shared with police superiors.

No one is buying it. PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused Sánchez of either lying or being incompetent; far-right Vox’s Santiago Abascal called what happened an attack on Spain and said the PM is a traitor (even the 🍊 menace is joining the criticism).

• With friends like thee… More awkwardly, Sánchez’s own parliamentary allies rejected his version: leftish Sumar said exonerating Morocco was “not credible,” while ERC, Podemos, Bildu and the PNV all pointed to Rabat’s responsibility in one form or another.

• The Spanish public overwhelmingly agrees with them. A new 40dB/El País poll found that almost 90% of Spaniards believe Morocco was responsible, while 63% think Sánchez handled the situation badly or very badly.

• Sánchez said he isn’t ruling Morocco out entirely. He says that if solid evidence shows Rabat planned or executed the operation, Spain will respond “with total force.”

Meanwhile, Ceuta is a ticking time bomb. Thousands of migrants are still moving around the city, and many frustrated residents are now turning that anger on anyone they think might have crossed the border illegally.

• Ceuta’s regional president Juan Jesús Vivas (PP) visited Brussels to warn EU officials that “Ceuta is a pressure cooker that could explode at any moment,” calling for a bigger European presence in the city and a concrete plan to return irregular migrants to Morocco.

• Even the King is getting involved. Felipe VI met with Defense Minister Margarita Robles and Spain’s military leadership to discuss Ceuta “from the point of view of defense” (suggesting this isn’t just a migrant crisis).

• Money, please. Brussels is stepping in with €114.7m in emergency aid to help Spain deal with the ongoing crisis in Ceuta.

Sánchez did make one concession yesterday: Spain needs to get better at anticipating this kind of crisis. In an interview with PSOE-friendly La 1, he said what happened in Ceuta was a “hybrid attack” (that involved disinformation campaigns on social media) and that Spanish intelligence needs to become more sophisticated at detecting online activity that could signal mass movements before they happen.

• Dreaming is free. He also confirmed he intends to run for another term in 2027. He’ll need quite the comeback. Most recent polls put the PP and Vox above 50% of the vote combined for the first time, while the PSOE, Sumar and Podemos together sit at just 36.1%.

• The Ceuta crisis plays directly into Vox’s strongest issue: immigration. 27% of Spaniards now say Vox is the party best equipped to handle it, ahead of both the PSOE and PP.

If those numbers hold, the likely outcome next year is clearly a PP-Vox government.

2. 🎬 Spain has narrowed its Oscar race down to three

Woohoo! Spain has narrowed its Oscar race down to three. The Spanish Film Academy has preselected La bola negra, Los domingos, and El ser querido as the three films that could represent our country at the 99th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.

Academy members now vote again, with Spain’s final choice announced on Sept. 16. Care to place a bet? We do. 😉

• ⚫️ La bola negra (see trailer above). Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (aka Los Javis) won Best Director at Cannes for their ambitious drama connecting three queer stories set in 1932, 1937 and 2017, with Federico García Lorca and a century of LGBTQ+ history running through them.

• The cast includes Guitarricadelafuente, Milo Quifes, Brays Efe (aka Paquita Salas) and Carlos González, alongside other, ahem, little-known supporting names: Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. It opens in Spanish theaters on Sept. 25, before eventually streaming on Movistar Plus+ (or Netflix, if you live abroad).

• ⛪ Los domingos. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s drama follows a 17-year-old girl who announces that she wants to become a cloistered nun, throwing her comfortable Bilbao family into a debate over faith, freedom, indoctrination, and whether she’s really old enough to make that decision.

• Blanca Soroa plays the teenager, alongside Patricia López Arnaiz and Miguel Garcés. It’s arguably the most decorated of the three already, having won the Golden Shell at San Sebastián and the Goya for Best Picture. You can watch it now on Movistar Plus+.

• 💔 El ser querido. Rodrigo Sorogoyen moves away from the thrillers he’s famous for with a much more intimate family drama starring Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo.

• Bardem plays a celebrated, two-time-Oscar-winning film director who returns to Spain and reunites with the daughter he effectively abandoned 13 years earlier, reopening a considerable amount of emotional damage while he’s shooting his latest movie. It premiered in Spanish theaters in August and is coming soon to Movistar Plus+.

• 🎄 Surprisingly (although not really), Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas didn’t make the cut.

Hollywood will announce the 15-film international shortlist on Dec. 15, before revealing the final five Oscar nominees on Jan. 21, 2027. The Oscars themselves take place March 14, with Conan O’Brien returning as host.

• We predict La Bola Negra will go far.

3. 👩🏻‍⚖️ Supreme Court pauses law that lets Spanish nietos vote

Remember Spain’s controversial mass migrant regularization? Well, forget about that dustup. It’s time to discuss another contentious regularization, the Ley de Nietos (The Grandchildren’s Law), a provision of the 2022 Ley de Memoria Democrática that granted Spanish citizenship — and the right to vote — to grandchildren of Civil War and Franco exiles. The Supreme Court just put a hold on it — and it’s far more complex than you could imagine.

• The latest. The Supremes temporarily suspended the part of the law that gave automatic voter registration to those nationalized under the Ley de Nietos. The hold was requested by the tight righties of Vox and the right-wing legal group Iustitia Europa, who warned that without a pause, upcoming elections could be “irreversibly tainted.”

• Who loses out? The ruling affects 333,696 people already inscribed on Spain’s overseas electoral roll, whose voting rights have been suspended for future elections, plus 238,065 who obtained nationality but haven’t yet been registered. The carve-out: those who can prove via consular certificate that their parents or grandparents actually fled for political reasons keep their votes. Everyone else must chill.

So what’s the dealio? The Ley de Nietos had broad support when it passed in 2022 — even the PP voted for a similar Senate measure in 2018, and PP boss Feijóo personally campaigned in Buenos Aires in 2023 promising nationality to descendants of Spanish emigrants. The problem came six days after the law passed, when the Justice Ministry quietly issued an instruction that changed pretty much everything. Instead of requiring proof of exile, it presumed that anyone whose ancestor left Spain between July 18, 1936 and Dec. 31, 1955 qualified.

• And that means? That interpretation turned a targeted civil-war reparation into a blanket naturalization for the Spanish diaspora. Applications hit 2.45m (‼️), and while monthly registrations were projected at 10–16,000, the actual number hit 29,000 in just 60 days.

The vote-rigging argument. Feijóo now calls it “electoral engineering”, while Vox calls it outright vote-rigging, arguing that the unpopular Sánchez government is trying to win upcoming elections by packing the voter rolls.

• Trumpistan. The government calls that take “Trumpismo“, and Reuters drew the same parallel explicitly, comparing the rhetoric to Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s election-denial playbooks.

Side effects. The court’s ruling creates an uncomfortable two-tier citizenship, where descendants of proven exiles keep their votes, while everyone else in the process hangs in limbo.

• What’s next? The Supreme Court has ordered the electoral roll to separate the two categories of registrations within 15 days; the JEC then has 10 days to issue a clarifying instruction. The final ruling on the merits could take considerably longer, and elections could arrive before it does.

Hot take. It’s true that the Sánchez gov is desperate to find a way to try to win next year’s almost unwinnable elections. But we're not sure this is that. Plus, this is a bad look for the stumble-prone PP — and one that likely won’t win it votes overseas.

4. 🚗 SEAT is dead! Long live SEAT!

You've probably been wondering why so many Spaniards are weeping in the street about the fate of the SEAT car brand? Okay, probably not. But while we’ve seen no actual tears, we do detect a touch of nostalgia in the air about SEAT. Why? Oh, maybe because it sorta defined the Spanish car industry for the last 76 years — and may soon die.

• The news. A German magazine, WirtschaftsWoche, got its hands on a confidential 147-page internal report prepared for the supervisory board at the struggling Volkswagen car company, which is restructuring (i.e., cutting its own organs out). The verdict on SEAT, VW’s Spanish subsidiary: “the brand will be phased out in an orderly and cost-efficient manner by the end of 2029 at the latest.” 😱

Cue freak out. Foment del Treball, the main business lobby in Catalonia (where SEATs are made), declared SEAT “part of our industrial heritage” and said its future in the region “must be absolutely guaranteed”; unions at the Martorell factory vowed to fight. Oh, and the PP demanded a “profound shift” in the Spanish government’s industrial policy (because everything is Sánchez’s fault).

• And the company? VW, for its part, issued a diplomatic non-denial: “several scenarios remain possible beyond 2030.”

A brief history. SEAT was founded in 1950 literally to modernize Spain. The Seat 600 (kinda like the Fiat 500) became the symbol of upward mobility in the Franco era and sold 800,000 between 1957 and 1973. The Ibiza, launched in 1984, has sold 6m units and is still the second best-selling car in Spain this year. VW took over in 1986, and SEAT grew into Spain’s largest industrial company (and exporter), with €15bn in annual revenue and 13,000 employees today.

• So why is VW done with it? The numbers stopped making sense. Cupra, the sportier, pricier brand SEAT itself spun off in 2018, now outsells the parent by 28% and makes far more money per car. SEAT’s lineup is getting old (there’s been no real Ibiza overhaul since 2017); it has no electric model, and sales fell 17% last year. So, sad times.

And now… With VW carrying 500,000 vehicles of excess annual global capacity, something had to give. So little baby Cupra ate the parent. 👶

5. 🗣️ Archaeologists found a 2,400-year-old human head

If you thought the ending of Seven was gruesome (Google it, kids!), we bring you a similar story with a much happier ending. Archaeologists digging through an ancient Roman city in Albacete found something rather unexpected inside a wall: a 2,400-year-old human head. Don’t panic…it’s made of stone! (Unlike, you know… the one in Seven).

• This is huge news because it may finally help solve one of the biggest mysteries at one of Spain’s most fascinating archaeological sites. (No, not the one about whether the lost city of Atlantis was in Spain. A different one.)

The nearly life-sized limestone head was found at Libisosa, beneath the modern town of Lezuza. It dates to the 5th or 4th century BC, but archaeologists discovered it built into the wall of a much later Roman granary (aka a grain house). Basically, the Romans used a centuries-old Iberian sculpture as a brick.

• So, whose head is it? Not Gwyneth Paltrow’s (seriously, go watch Seven). The face is unfortunately missing, but the hair survived: braids gathered at the back, curls over the forehead, and a visible ear. Those details suggest it depicted a young man, possibly a teenager, from an important local family.

• He may once have been considerably more impressive. Researchers think the head belonged either to a standing figure or a monumental horseman (like the undead dude from Sleepy Hollow, maybe?), probably erected over the tomb of a member of the local elite. People couldn’t brag on Instagram back then, so these sculptures acted as displays of status, family lineage, and power.

And this was before the Romans arrived. Libisosa began as an oppidum, or fortified city, of the Oretani, an Iberian people who lived across parts of modern Albacete, Ciudad Real and Jaén. The settlement was destroyed during the Sertorian War in the 1st century BC, leaving streets, objects and even bodies remarkably well preserved.

• That’s why Libisosa has been nicknamed the “Iberian Pompeii.” Rome later built the colony of Libisosa Foroaugustana over it, and the city was important enough to be mentioned by Pliny the Elder.

• But here’s why a stone head is such a big deal. Archaeologists have been excavating Libisosa since 1996, yet they have never found its Iberian cemetery. The head may finally be the clue they needed.

• The theory is that the Romans dismantled the old necropolis and used its monuments as a quarry. If this head ended up in a nearby Roman building, the tomb it originally belonged to probably wasn’t very far away, and other pieces could still be scattered around the site. It’s basically the plot of Poltergeist but, like, in the 70s. (The literal 70s, because the Sertorian War ended in 70 BC).

What happened to his face? It may simply have been worn away after centuries of abuse, but archaeologists haven’t ruled out deliberate destruction. They’re now analyzing the stone and searching for microscopic traces of pigment, since Iberian sculptures would originally have been painted in bright colors rather than left bare.

• There should be plenty more where that came from. Libisosa covers more than 30 hectares and has already produced over 155,000 archaeological objects—but after three decades of excavations, only around 10% of the site has been explored.

Meaning that somewhere under that hill in Albacete, 90% of an ancient city, and perhaps its long-lost cemetery, is still waiting to be found.

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🙏 Once again, please remember to share this newsletter with your friends on social media. The more we grow, the more information we’ll be able to offer each week.

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