(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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🗳️ 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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💣 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. 👇👇

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. 😵 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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🇪🇺 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. 👇👇

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🎙️ Episode 5 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

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💬 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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🇪🇺 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. 👇👇

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🎙️ 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!

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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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💥 Did Spain’s police just blow a hole in the government’s Ceuta story?

BOOM. A month after thousands of people crossed into Ceuta over two days, Spain still doesn’t know exactly what happened (or won't say), and now the country’s own police may have blown a rather enormous hole in the government’s narrative.

• Blowing up the story. On Tuesday night, El Español reported that a 55-page police report sent to a judge says Moroccan security forces helped “guide” migrants into Spanish territory and suggests the operation was intended to overwhelm Spain’s ability to respond.

• And that's not all. On top of that, the police gave the report to the judge without the Interior Ministry knowing it existed.

Quick recap. On July 30 and 31, around 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, overwhelming the tiny Spanish exclave (we covered it here). A month later, 5,000-10,000 remain there, public services and businesses are under enormous strain, residents are afraid to leave their homes, and Ceuta’s president Juan Jesús Vivas (from the center-right PP) says the city is a pressure cooker that could explode any second.

• The government’s story hasn’t really changed. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (center-left PSOE) has resisted accusations that Rabat deliberately engineered the crisis and has continued defending Spain’s relationship with Morocco, thanking them for their “quick response”, while his government has also blamed the flood of migrants on coordinated human traffickers and said Russian and Israeli networks tried to exploit the crisis online.

• Um, no. Opposition leaders, and even the government’s junior partners in Parliament, weren’t buying the story.

Then came Tuesday night’s bombshell story. Investigators from the National Police’s Centro Nacional de Inmigración y Fronteras (CENIF) analyzed videos and social media messages from the crisis and reached some fairly extraordinary conclusions.

• I'll be your illegal border crossing guide. According to local media, the report describes “permissiveness” by Moroccan security forces, and they participated by “guiding the crossing through the water.”

• Not just people looking for a better life. To make things worse, investigators say the events were not accidental and that the whole point may have been to direct a massive flow of people toward Ceuta with the objective of “eliminating Spain’s capacity to respond.”

• On the down low. The report was commissioned by National Court judge María Tardón, who, according to Spain’s police chief, ordered investigators not to share its preparation or contents with their superiors (not even at the top of the Interior ministry) while the judicial investigation remained secret. ‼️

Wait… what?! Imagine Spain’s government learning what its own police thought about a national-security crisis from… the press. 😱 Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska demanded explanations from National Police chief Francisco Pardo, while government sources told El País that the situation was “inconceivable” and complained they were effectively “blind” to what investigators were doing.

• The conspiracy theories began. Some government officials reportedly wondered whether the police were deliberately operating against the government. ‼️

But wait, we’re not done. The police chief says the report doesn’t blame Morocco. Well, not exactly. Pardo told Marlaska that no police report attributes the “planning or execution” of the crisis to Moroccan security forces. That is technically compatible with investigators saying Moroccan officers participated or facilitated the crossings, but it hardly makes the situation clearer. 🙄

• Break out the popcorn. 🍿 The result is a shit show an extraordinary institutional mess in which the report describes Moroccan participation while Interior insists it doesn’t establish Moroccan responsibility. So… the Moroccan authorities weren’t the mastermind, just… aides? 🤔

Bad timing. Speaking of inconveniences, yesterday was Ceuta Day, a holiday marking the appointment of the first governor of Ceuta in 1415. In order to show solidarity with it, many demonstrations were organized across Spain.

• Taking their toys and going home. The Socialist party, however, refused to participate, arguing that the supposedly nonpartisan rallies had become politicized by the PP and Vox.

• We're not gonna take it. Meanwhile, regional president Vivas used his official address to issue perhaps the starkest warning yet: “Ceuta can’t take any more.” He said the city remains in “serious danger,” accused Morocco of deliberately trying to suffocate Ceuta and Melilla, and warned that Spain has effectively left control over its territorial integrity “in Morocco’s hands.”

Everyone smells blood. PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo, visiting Ceuta for the third time since the crisis began, accused Sánchez’s government of lying and praised the police and intelligence services.

• And at the extremes… Far-right Vox joined PP-organized demonstrations across Spain. Far-left Podemos went further, calling the episode an act of Moroccan “hybrid warfare” and demanding Marlaska resign immediately. 😵‍💫

• With friends like these. Even leftish coalition Sumar — which is part of the government — isn’t buying the government’s certainty. Health Minister Mónica García said that, if the report is confirmed, Moroccan participation would be “serious” and Madrid must demand explanations from Rabat.

Where does all this leave Sánchez? After a pretty slow response (it was August, after all 🏝️), Sánchez thanked Ceuta for its “serenity”, admitted that many felt the government’s response had been “insufficient” and highlighted a new €309m aid package, saying the priority is getting migrants off the streets and restoring normality.

• What about Morocco though? The government is sticking to its cautious line: it says there is still no police finding that Morocco planned the operation, wants to examine the report in full, and continues treating Rabat as a crucial partner blah blah blah. Which, at this point, is pretty sus weird. And sounds a lot like 🐂💩.

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. 🏠 Ayuso’s €6.3m penthouse “attic” refuses to disappear

Heading into summer like woa. Right before our summer break, we mentioned a small political scandal involving the purchase of a €6.3 million penthouse “attic” that seemed to be giving Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso more than a headache.

• Guess what. The story is back (or rather, it never went away) because Ayuso’s team has now acknowledged that one of her advisers visited it before the purchase, and Ayuso herself went to see it afterward.

A recap. In April, the regional government quietly bought a luxury penthouse an “attic” in Chamberí through public company Planifica Madrid, supposedly as a possible temporary workspace for Ayuso while the Real Casa de Correos, in Puerta del Sol, was renovated.

• The problem. The property is legally residential, not an office, and the search criteria reportedly called for 250-400 square meters and a large terrace; oddly specific requirements for temporary government offices.

• The other problem. The penthouse “attic” is (coincidentally, we’re sure), located literally across the street from where Ayuso’s mother lives.

Ayuso said she knew basically nothing about it. When the purchase became public in late July, she called the story a smear campaign, insisted the apartment had not been bought for her to live in, and later said she had “not the faintest idea” about the details.

• The PP wasn’t thrilled. Party officials privately described the operation as an error and struggled to understand why the regional government had bought an expensive luxury residence “attic” through a high-end real estate agency.

• Dad's not happy. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo publicly said the responsible department still needed to explain why it bought a property that couldn’t legally be used as an office.

Madrid tried to kill the story. Within about 24 hours of the scandal erupting, the government announced it would sell the penthouse “attic” (now offered for €6.7m; because Madrid prices are that insane) and put the proceeds toward reconstruction after the Sierra Oeste wildfires.

• Nothing to see here. Ayuso then declared the matter finished with the very Ayuso-esque quote: “Está en venta, chao pescao.” (“It’s for sale, end of story” — or, as The Guardian put it, “see you later alligator”).

Except not quite. Her government now admits that an adviser inspected the property before officials decided to buy it, and Ayuso herself visited in June or early July, after the €6.3m purchase had already been completed.

• Nothing to see here, pt. 2. Her team says she was merely assessing it as one possible location for her temporary office and had not made a final decision to move there (fun fact: Madrid has no official residence for its regional president, unlike some other comunidades autónomas).

Why should I care about all of this? Visiting the penthouse “attic” doesn’t prove it was secretly bought as Ayuso’s home. But it makes her earlier insistence that she had essentially no knowledge of the operation considerably harder to reconcile with what actually happened.

• We've got questions. Who decided Madrid needed to buy a €6.3 million luxury apartment “attic”? Why did an “office” need a huge terrace? Why buy a residential property that couldn’t legally be used as one? And why was none of this publicly announced until journalists found it?

• So much complaining. Five complaints relating to the purchase are already before a Madrid judge, and the opposition is pushing for scrutiny by the Tribunal de Cuentas (essentially the country’s public-money watchdog and auditing court).

Whoopsie!

2. 🧑‍🎓 Catalonia fails its big exam

We’ve never gotten caught cheating on an exam by taping the answers inside our sunglasses. But Catalonia? That’s a different story. This week brought firings and disciplinary proceedings in its education department after it came to light that it had engaged in some, let’s say, questionable behavior around a major international exam.

• The scandal. Results from the latest PISA exam — a global education study of 15-year-olds run by the OECD — will be invalid for Catalonia, because 23% of selected 15-year-olds were exempted from the test vs. the OECD’s maximum of 5%. And this week, the Catalan government’s #2 in education, secretary general Teresa Sambola was fired, and disciplinary files were opened against three officials, after the Education department admitted the mess is its own fault following weeks of passing the blame. “The responsibility lies with the department,” admitted Education Minister Esther Niubó.

The history. This is Catalonia’s second PISA scandal in three years. In 2022, the region’s scores hit historic lows — reading scores dropped 20 points (experts say 10 = failure; 20 = a lost academic year) — and the then-head of Catalonia’s Evaluation Council was fired after he blamed the collapse on too many immigrant students in the sample.

• No bosses. That firing left the Council essentially leaderless during the 2025 testing period. The national Education Ministry warned Catalan authorities seven times between April 9 and May 30 that the exclusion rate was way too high — while tests were still being administered. The warnings never reached the schools.

The (unproven) political angle. Catalonia and the Basque Country run Spain’s two most aggressive linguistic immersion systems — where classes are taught primarily in Catalan or Euskera rather than Castilian — and both tanked in PISA 2022. Right-of-center critics argue this year’s exclusions in Catalonia were deliberate. That is, the idea was to remove struggling students — who are, disproportionately, those who don’t speak Catalan at home — and hide the model’s failure.

The Basque Country, for its part, didn’t exclude students in schools across the system. But it did reduce the number of participating schools, from 97 in 2022 to the bare OECD minimum of 56 this time. “There may be secondary intentions,” says education researcher José Manuel Lacasa — though he adds the bad results aren’t only about immersion, but also “declining curricular rigor.”

• Let’s be clear. This theory is politically charged and loudly pushed by national right-wing parties. But it can’t be completely discarded.

PISA results will be published on Sept. 8, which happens to be the first day of school in Catalonia. Timing!

3. 💸 The inflation is coming, the inflation is coming…

Did things seem to get more expensive while you were on vacation? They did. While you were lolling on the beach like a carmelized croqueta, inflation in August spiked to its highest level in 43 months. That’s what you get for turning your back on the economy.

• The news: Spain’s August CPI hit 4.3% — up from 3.6% in July, and above analyst expectations of around 4%. That’s the highest since the 6% of February 2023, when the country was still wrestling with post-Ukraine invasion chaos and a Covid hangover.

Why: Fuel. The Iran war has kept the Strait of Hormuz energy route partially blocked, pushing oil up to $90/barrel, and prices at the pump have followed. The government was also winding down earlier fuel tax subsidies, which only made things worse. The diesel spike was so sharp (above 15%) that it triggered a safeguard clause: instead of cutting the diesel discount to 5 cents/liter in September, the government is restoring it to 20 cents.

• But that’s not all. Core inflation actually ticked down to 2.9%. For now, companies are absorbing higher energy costs rather than passing them on to you. But fresh food prices nearly doubled their rise, from a 2.3% rise in July to 4.5% in August. Higher transport and energy costs tend to reach supermarket shelves with a delay, and that’s the first sign they are. That’s why the European Central Bank has warned prices won’t slow down until early 2027 at the earliest, and a rate hike is looking more likely. So expect to pay more for your fruit, veg and hipoteca.

In other not-quite-reassuring economic news, Spain has slipped out of the world’s top 12 economies by GDP, dropping to 14th in the latest IMF rankings, behind Mexico (133m people vs. Spain’s 50m) and Australia.

• The Australian case is mostly a funny money story, though. The Aussie dollar strengthened about 10% against both the euro and the dollar, so its GDP pass is not a negative reflection of Spain’s economic health. Spain is still growing at 2.7% year-on-year, three times the eurozone average, after all. 🎉

So no reason to panic. Yet.

4. 🧓🏻 Now Spain’s rich retirees get to make even more money by working!

Ok, we’re kidding — but only kinda. New rules put in place in the last week allow Spanish retirees to continue working as autónomos (oh, the joy) while still collecting part of their pension. Which is the most normal thing in the world. And also kinda controversial. Let’s dive into why.

• The new rules. As of August 28, Spain’s “jubilación flexible” system expanded to include the self-employed for the first time. Previously, it only applied to retirees returning to part-time salaried work. Now, retirees can earn income as autónomos while collecting 25% of their pension — as long as they haven’t been registered as autónomos in the three years before retiring (to prevent people from just... continuing their old business). For salaried returners, the eligible hours window expands from 25-75% to 33-80% of a normal workweek, with a pension bonus of 15-25% for those who wait at least six months before returning.

Different this time? Barely anyone uses the existing flexible retirement system: only 79,000 people — under 1% of Spain’s 10 million retirees — currently combine a pension with work; just 4.9% of new retirees continue working after starting to collect, vs. 13% across the EU.

• The government is hoping these new changes, alongside reforms making early retirement costlier, will nudge the average retirement age higher. It has already crept up from 64.4 to 65.4 years since 2019 — buying time for a pension system facing a €62 billion annual deficit as the baby boom generation retires. But as they say, 65 is the new 35…

The controversy. Two things irk people about the new deal.

• First, the average new retiree’s pension already exceeds the average salary of a young Spaniard, so expanding the avenues to earn even more feels, to some, tone-deaf.

• Second, figures on the farish left (we're looking at you, Yolanda Díaz) argue older workers “hoard” jobs that should go to young people — an argument most economists dismiss as a finite jobs fallacy, but one that resonates with a generation struggling to find stable work.

With or without a job, we’d rather be a retiree in Spain than, say, Connecticut. Just saying.

5. 🏺 Gone in 240 seconds: Thieves nick one of Europe’s great Bronze Age treasures

Robbers don’t take a summer break. One of Spain’s most important archaeological collections has been stolen, and we’re all pretty heartbroken about it.

• Masked thieves broke into the Museo de Villena in Alicante in the early hours of Thursday last week, and stole most of the Tesoro de Villena, a 59-piece Bronze Age hoard made largely of gold. And it was all done in four minutes.

Why this matters. The treasure was discovered by a construction worker in 1963. Dated to roughly 1250 BC, it includes bowls, bracelets, bottles and ornaments and is considered Spain’s most important prehistoric gold hoard and one of the most significant in Europe.

• And it was worth a lot. The gold alone has been valued at roughly €1.5-€1.7m, but its historical and archaeological value is effectively incalculable.

The robbery was fast and clearly planned. At 5:16 a.m., an alarm went off at a municipal sports complex around two kilometers away. Police headed there. Four minutes later, the museum alarm sounded.

• Security footage shows three people arriving in two vehicles. After failing to enter through the front door, the thieves forced open a reinforced side window, smashed the display cases, and fled before officers arrived at 5:24 a.m.

• Look over there! Investigators are considering whether the first alarm was a deliberate diversion and whether the gang specifically targeted the gold.

The security decisions are now under scrutiny. The originals had previously been stored in a bank vault while visitors saw a replica, but when the new museum opened in 2024, Villena decided to put the real treasure on permanent display.

• The museum’s security budget was cut from €10,000 to €3,000 this year, according to El Debate, and there was no permanent overnight guard.

• The city insists the museum had the required security measures. Asked why it did not keep using the replica, officials reportedly said: “People pay to see the original, not a replica.” (To be fair, that makes sense to us).

One priceless piece survived because it didn’t look valuable. The thieves left behind a dark iron bracelet that recent research found was actually made from meteorite iron, one of the earliest known objects in Iberia made from extraterrestrial material.

And Villena is not alone. It is the third major museum robbery of this kind in Spain in roughly four months, after gold coins were stolen in Badajoz and Albacete. Europol has warned that museum thefts across Europe are becoming faster (remember the Louvre?), more violent and increasingly focused on gold and precious objects that can be melted down and sold.

• That is now the nightmare scenario in Villena. A treasure that survived more than 3,000 years could disappear forever because, to the thieves, it may be worth more as metal than as history.

Sad face. 🙁

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72,000 crossings and 80 deaths

🔥 Ceuta after the chaos: what we know so far

Yes, last week we said this newsletter was taking August off. But then a massive crisis exploded at the Spain/Morocco border with tragic consequences. Here is a quick summary of what you should know.

You’ve probably seen the images by now. Tens of thousands of mostly young Moroccans swimming around breakwaters, climbing fences, and overwhelming the beaches of Ceuta sparked panic across Spain, alarmed European governments, and dominated headlines around the world.

• Social media was on fire. Influencers and media outlets were covering it across the board, many of them portraying it as proof that Europe had lost control of its borders.

• Now, almost a week later, the emergency phase appears to be over. But while the crowds have largely disappeared, many of the biggest questions remain unanswered.

What we know so far. The scale of this crisis was totally unprecedented. Around 72,000 people crossed into Ceuta in just a few days, making it by far the largest irregular border crossing Spain has ever experienced.

• Before you panic. Around 70,000 have already been returned to Morocco, while others (many of them minors) are still in the area. The authorities are assessing their situation.

• The human cost was high. Authorities are now working to identify 80 confirmed victims (an NGO says the total is 141, counting the ones who died on Moroccan soil), most of whom drowned while trying to reach the Ceuta shore. Many remain unidentified, and Spanish forensic teams continue coordinating with Moroccan authorities to notify families.

Viralization effect. Investigators now agree that the crisis was mainly caused by a coordinated social media misinformation campaign. Viral TikTok videos, Facebook groups, and WhatsApp messages all falsely claimed that “Spain’s border is open” and that migrants arriving by sea could no longer be returned after a recent Spanish Supreme Court ruling.

• The posts even shared Google Maps routes, recommended where to buy wetsuits and waterproof bags, and pointed people toward the least guarded sections of Ceuta’s coastline before disappearing from the internet.

Europe’s initial reaction. In the first 48 hours, several European governments reacted with concern. Italy reinstated temporary passport checks for travelers arriving from Spain, while politicians in Finland and Denmark and elsewhere questioned whether Spain’s handling of the crisis threatened the Schengen Area and suggested that Spain's recent regularization drive may have acted as a "pull” factor for the immigrant flood. Twenty-two EU countries called for emergency talks over the crisis.

• That tone has now changed. Following that emergency meeting of EU interior ministers on Tuesday, member states largely rallied behind Spain, praising its response and expressing “total solidarity” with Madrid.

• The focus has shifted from criticizing Spanish migration policy to strengthening the EU’s external borders, improving intelligence sharing, and dismantling migrant smuggling networks.

• Italy remains the exception. Rome has kept temporary passport checks in place, although it is increasingly difficult to defend doing so, given that Ceuta is not part of the Schengen Area and nearly all of those who entered have already been returned to Morocco. (And Italy has more irregular migrant crossings than Spain.)

Was this a “manufactured” crisis? So far, we’re not sure. Officially, Morocco insists it neither encouraged nor organized the mass crossing. But Morocco has repeatedly outmaneuvered Spain politically in recent years, using immigration as a weapon.

• Rabat claims the trigger was Spain’s Supreme Court ruling. Moroccan officials also say that decision spread rapidly across social media, convincing thousands of young people that reaching Ceuta meant reaching Europe.

• Morocco also says its police avoided confronting such enormous crowds to prevent even greater loss of life, and emphasized that it continues accepting the return of migrants under existing agreements. Moroccan authorities have now prosecuted 77 people accused of organizing illegal crossings or participating in violence during the crisis.

We beg to differ(ish). Spanish intelligence, however, paints a more nuanced picture. Their current assessment is that Morocco did not plan the operation, but allowed it to happen and then exploited it politically once events spiraled out of control. That distinction may prove important as relations between Madrid and Rabat enter another delicate phase.

• It comes at a particularly sensitive moment geopolitically. Morocco has grown noticeably closer to the Trump administration in recent months, while relations between Pedro Sánchez and Washington remain strained over defense spending and foreign policy.

• Morocco also continues to press its long-standing claims over Ceuta and Melilla whenever opportunities arise (FYI: Ceuta and Melilla are not colonies but Spanish exclaves on African territory. Their citizens are Spanish with full rights. Ceuta has been a part of Spain since 1580.) Things are so tough that leftist coalition Sumar is saying Spain shouldn’t even organize the 2030 World Cup with Morocco.

Enter the far-right. While the border itself has largely returned to normal, the political battle is only beginning. Across Europe and the U.S., far-right politicians quickly framed the events as proof of an “invasion.” U.S. Vice President JD Vance, Britain’s Nigel Farage, Germany’s Alice Weidel, and others shared videos suggesting these migrants were now heading across Europe.

• Obviously, this isn’t true. Ceuta is not mainland Spain and, as we explained above, entering Ceuta does not provide automatic access to the Schengen Area. Everyone leaving the city for mainland Spain must pass through identity checks at the port or airport. Plus, most of them were sent back to Morocco, so… no.

• Other fake news spread just as quickly. Claims that Sánchez’s recent migrant regularization encouraged people to cross the border “so they could become citizens and vote for him” ignore the basic fact that the people who arrived in Ceuta would not qualify under that program (in order to qualify, you had to be living in Spain and the deadline to apply has passed).

This was a big f*ck up, though. Even if Morocco bears significant responsibility or even instigated the crisis, Madrid is unlikely to escape scrutiny. The biggest question remains why Spanish intelligence failed to anticipate a movement that had been openly growing across Moroccan social media for days.

• Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska insists the government received no intelligence warning suggesting anything close to a mass crossing of this magnitude. At the same time, he said stuff “happens” and that doesn’t necessarily mean someone is responsible. 🤔

• That claim has triggered an unusual public disagreement within the government itself. Defense Minister Margarita Robles has defended the work of the CNI intelligence service while pointing out that Interior also oversees its own information services through the National Police and Civil Guard.

• The opposition Popular Party has seized on the confusion, accusing Sánchez of leaving Ceuta unprotected despite warning signs. Party leaders argue the government failed to reinforce the border in time and are demanding a full parliamentary explanation.

And now? The immediate emergency may be mostly over, but few believe the story is finished. Authorities still do not know who created the original viral campaign that convinced thousands of people to head toward Ceuta. Most of the accounts disappeared almost immediately after the crisis began.

• Spanish investigators are already monitoring new conversations circulating on Facebook and WhatsApp discussing another possible attempt on Aug. 15. Whether those calls represent genuine planning, copycat rumors, or another misinformation campaign remains unclear.

• Spain has reinforced Ceuta’s maritime border with floating barriers, patrol boats, and extra security in an effort to prevent another mass crossing.

What is clear is that this has become a test of border security, intelligence gathering, information warfare, and Spain’s relationship with Morocco. The crossings may have mostly stopped (or at least paused), but the political blowback is only beginning.

🎙️ Episode 4 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

On our latest episode, we discuss what it really means to belong in Spain today and explore one of the country's biggest identity debates—from immigration and Spain's record-breaking migrant regularization to the controversial Ley de Nietos—alongside Sweden's ambassador to Spain and writer Elizabeth Duval.

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

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@thebubblecomSpanish cities are changing fast. #elizabethduval #madrid #gentrification #madridlife #spain

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🚨 Like all good Spaniards, this newsletter — our Thursday news and politics one — will take a break in August. (Our Friday events guide will continue publishing!) See you in September…and enjoy 😎!

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Scorched earth politics

🔥 Spain's worst wildfire on record appears to be under control at last. Don't get used to saying that.

Bad times. For nearly a week, large parts of central Spain looked like something out of a movie apocalypse, with hillsides burned, villages and towns evacuated, highways closed, and smoke from the flames visible from Madrid.

• The scene was an inferno. At its peak, the government declared a Level 3 national emergency—the first time Spain has ever done so for wildfires—and tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes.

• The good news is that the situation seems to be finally improving. The massive fire affecting Madrid and neighboring Ávila had been technically stabilized as of last night, authorities said, allowing thousands of residents to begin returning home.

• But “stabilized” doesn’t mean over. Firefighters remain on alert, several areas are still evacuated, and officials warn that another heat wave could easily reignite hotspots in the coming days. (Yesterday Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said things were “favorable”, although he asked people to be “cautious”.)

The big one. The fire that devastated Madrid and Ávila has already gone down as the largest wildfire in modern Spanish history, burning more than 50,000 hectares.

One culprit. Investigators believe the disaster in Ávila began with a spark from an excavator carrying out illegal work to open a road near Burgohondo (Ávila) during a period when heavy machinery was banned due to the extreme fire risk.

• The eight-ton machine struck rock with a hydraulic hammer, the Guardia Civil said, creating the spark that ignited dry vegetation. The fire then exploded across forests already primed by weeks of scorching temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds.

A heartbreaking tragedy. The human cost has been huge. Around 63,000 people were evacuated at the height of the crisis, making it one of Spain’s largest peacetime evacuations in recent memory.

• Home again. Roughly 24,000 have now been allowed to return home, while another 10,000 people in Madrid remain displaced or confined. Authorities say at least 100 primary residences have been destroyed, with the damage to second homes still being assessed.

• Happy news. Despite the scale of the disaster, no deaths have been reported, although several firefighters and emergency personnel suffered injuries during the operation.

The fires stretched far beyond Madrid. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), more than 206,000 hectares have burned across Spain this year—well above the average—and the country has recorded 376 fires, more than double the norm.

• Spain didn’t fight the fires alone. Through the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism, Greece, Italy, and Türkiye sent firefighting aircraft, while Portugal deployed more than 130 firefighters and dozens of emergency vehicles to help contain the flames.

Enter politics. The disaster briefly produced an unusual display of cooperation. PM Sánchez praised the “institutional loyalty” shown between different levels of government and renewed his call for a national pact to prepare Spain for a future of more frequent climate disasters.

• Madrid presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso (of the center-right PP) announced 58 recovery measures, including psychological support, hotel accommodation for displaced residents, aid for damaged homes, veterinary care, and assistance for elderly and dependent people.

• But, no. The PP, however, rejected Sánchez’s proposal for a pact, accusing the government of weakening Spain’s firefighting capabilities, while simultaneously urging Brussels to develop a stronger EU-wide wildfire prevention strategy.

Scientists have warned for years that longer heat waves, prolonged droughts, and abandoned rural land are creating the perfect conditions for larger, faster-moving wildfires. This year’s figures already suggest that warning is already reality.

More news below. 👇👇

🎙️ Episode 4 of The Bubble Podcast is out!

On our latest episode, we discuss what it really means to belong in Spain today and explore one of the country's biggest identity debates—from immigration and Spain's record-breaking migrant regularization to the controversial Ley de Nietos—alongside Sweden's ambassador to Spain and writer Elizabeth Duval.

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🤦 Zapatero gave his first interview and cleared up nothing

Every political junkie in Spain was glued to TVE last Thursday. Former PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was there, on Mañaneros, giving his first interview since an Audiencia Nacional (National Court) investigating judge charged him with leading a network of illicit influence peddling. Bring out the 🍿, because it was a doozie.

• The situation. Judge Calama of the Audiencia Nacional has Zapatero under investigation for allegedly running an influence-peddling scheme around the government bailout of airline Plus Ultra, plus money laundering, tax fraud, smuggling, and organized crime.

• The fly in the ointment. Two days before the interview, his associate Julio Martínez — the administrator of consulting firm Análisis Relevante, the alleged hub of the operation — told the judge that Zapatero was “the one who set the pace,” i.e., el capo.

What Zapatero said. He mostly repeated what he’d already told the court in June. He again said he spoke about Plus Ultra to nobody in the government or the body that bailed it out (SEPI). He was just a consultant who created reports, he said. And that Dubai offshore company supposedly set up to hide his income? “An absolute invention”. Finally, did he use his daughters as fronts? Good god no, that would be “incredible.”

• Maybe I talked to someone. He did admit calling a Santander executive to arrange a meeting for Plus Ultra’s directors — but insists that’s just “facilitating a contact,” not peddling influence. Yeahhhh….

And what he didn’t. Zapatero didn’t address that testimony of his buddy Julito Martínez, who’d told the judge that Zapatero ran the show. “I am not going to get into the defense strategy of any defendant,” he said. hmmm…

• Where those jewels came from. When asked about the 80 or so pieces of jewelry found in his office safe — valued at €1.32m ‼️— he said they were “a courtesy gift from many years ago.” From who? “I’m not going to say the country.” Why undeclared to the taxman? “There was no patrimonial intent“ (what?). Did he know they were worth over a million? “We couldn’t even imagine that,” he said (his people previously estimated them at €30-50,000). He also said the jewelry gave him “a severe allergic reaction,” which we don’t understand…but find intriguing.

• Rules are for fools. And on the good governance code he signed as PM, which explicitly prohibits gifts of this value? “Interpretable.”

And this was on a friendly channel. El Español noted that after 20 minutes of hard questions, Mañaneros host Javier Ruiz declared Plus Ultra, the daughters, and the jewels all “done” — when none were resolved — and spent the rest letting Zapatero play the victim over his leaked agendas and invaded privacy. Ruiz ended with: “President, how are you doing?“ Awww…

The reviews? Not positive.

• Friends. The PSOE closed ranks behind their colleague publicly but privately felt let down: “We didn’t really understand the utility of the interview,” one source told El Mundo. Later, PM Sánchez got colder: “I’m not his spokesman,” he replied when asked this week about the case.

• Enemies. The opposition PP called his explanations “a joke,” while Madrid mayor Almeida described the interview as a “bath and massage session.” 🤣 Ouch.

What’s next? Zapatero still owes an explanation to Judge Calama about the jewels — he dodged those questions at his June testimony too.

2. 👉 Catalonia could take a hard (separatist) right turn

You thought Spain’s national government had drama with the far right? Take a look at Catalonia. There, a new poll shows that if elections were held now, far right parties could take up almost a third of seats in the regional parliament — with a new separatist party being the breakout star.

• The latest poll shows a big win for Aliança Catalana. The hard right separatist party led by Silvia Orriols (anti-immigrant, anti-Spain, pro-independence) would win 25-28 seats in the 135-seat parliament — up from a mere two seats now — and become the second-largest party, according to a poll taken by GESOP for El Periódico, a center-left newspaper.

• And they’re not the only tighty-far-righties on the ballot. Add in the 11-13 seats expected for the hard-right Vox (anti-immigrant, pro-Spain, pro-bullfighting), and the extrema derecha would have almost a third of the Catalan parliament.

Why Aliança is surging. The party started as a protest vehicle for pro-independence voters disillusioned by Junts and ERC, the longtime separatist parties that led the failed 2017 independence push.

• Party evolution. It’s since pivoted hard toward immigration and public safety — and is now pulling voters from across the spectrum: Junts (its biggest source, at 24.5% of their 2024 voters), Vox (13%), PSC (9.2%), ERC (7.9%) and PP (7.7%). It even leads among 18-29-year-olds and among people who didn’t vote in 2024 (which sounds a lot like Vox’s demographic). Their own voter loyalty is 94% — which pollsters say is unprecedented.

Who’s hurting most? The right-leaning separatists of Junts are the trainwreck of the poll. Their seat total drops from 35 to 15-18. Even the ruling center-left PSC isn’t immune — dropping from 42 to 34-37 seats as nearly 1 in 10 of its voters switch to Orriols.

The other parties had excuses. The PSC said extremism should be fought with better public policies (they’re already doing that, they say). ERC said Aliança’s rise can be beaten by giving voters “hope…and a future” (true, but can you?). The PP reminded voters that if they want “seny i ordre“ — common sense and order — they know where to look. And Junts? They declined to comment because, let’s be honest, it’s ugly.

Good news for centrists (kinda?). Catalonia doesn’t need new regional elections until May 2028. But Orriols will get a chance to show Aliança Catalana’s power in May 2027, when Spain holds municipal elections throughout the land. She is already targeting hundreds of local councils — many currently held by Junts.

3. 🏖️ The world can't decide whether Torres and Llorente are dating or not (they are not)

Sigh. We just won the World Cup, but somehow one of the biggest stories of the week wasn’t Ferran Torres’ sports talent—it was his hug in Ibiza.

Torres — our current hero after scoring Spain’s winning goal against Argentina — is taking some days off in Ibiza with his buddy and teammate Marcos Llorente.

• Torres is very handsy and kissy-kissy with his friends, if we go by what we always see on TV, so it wasn’t that strange to see him hugging and kissing Llorente on the neck. You know, like two friends would while enjoying the greatest summer of their lives.

Gay? Social media and some media outlets naturally had other ideas. Within hours, X, TikTok, and Instagram were flooded with claims that Torres was secretly—or not so secretly—gay. AI-generated images began circulating, old photos with teammate Pedri were taken out of context to suggest a hidden romance, and the internet did what it does best: confidently invent a new reality (no, we won’t link to any of it).

Nope, not gay. Not that we care, but Marcos Llorente has been married for years and has a daughter. Ferran Torres was in a long-term relationship with a woman until recently and has since been linked by Spanish gossip magazines to what feels like half of Spain’s influencer population. So… don’t get your hopes up.

This reaction says far more about us than it does about either player. For years we’ve argued that men should be allowed to express affection without being trapped by outdated ideas of masculinity.

• As we were saying. Spain striker Borja Iglesias responded that rumors after the photos “aren’t just about homophobia; they are about a society that still punishes any gesture that falls outside the script of traditional masculinity.”

• And again. Writer Boris Izaguirre defended the images as a perfectly normal display of affection, pointing out that warmth between men has long been part of Mediterranean culture and shouldn’t be treated as something scandalous.

But wait, there’s more. Remember when last week Ferran wore a red “Make Spain Great Again” cap during the World Cup celebrations? The hat—an obvious play on Donald Trump’s famous MAGA slogan—made a lot of people wonder whether he was making fun of Trump or supporting his movement.

• Support, obvi. The White House declared on X that “everyone wants to join the movement,” while Trump himself reposted Torres’ video multiple times, calling him “a great player” and describing the cap as “a nice tribute.”

• Torres has not explained what he meant by it, so… we’re waiting.

4. 👷 Yo-Yo is looking for a job — and Mr. Handsome might have found her one

Remember Yolanda Díaz? We had sorta forgotten her, since she resigned her role as the boss of the fading leftish Sumar party and became a pato cojo. But Yo-Yo needs a gig for when she leaves government — she’s had a glow-up since entering national politics, but still needs a paycheck, ya dig? Well, good news: She’s found a lead.

• The news. PM Sánchez — aka Mr. Handsome — has nominated Díaz to lead the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN’s labor body. If elected, she’d be the first woman and first Spaniard to run it.

What’s the ILO? Founded in 1919 and based in Geneva, it’s the UN’s only tripartite agency — governments, employers, and unions each hold a vote. The labor standards it sets become legally binding when countries ratify them; Spain has ratified 141, more than anyone.

• The bad news. The ILO is in financial crisis. The U.S. owes it €280 million — 70% of all unpaid dues — while the Orange Menace’s influence is reportedly creeping into ILO policy. How? Spanish unions say LGBTQ+ rights and the right to strike are increasingly hard to defend inside the organization.

Her chances? Complicated. Of the 56 votes, unions (14) are on board. Employer groups (14) — globally, not just in Spain — almost certainly won’t be, given her record of heavy interventions in the labor market. She also needs a majority of government votes (28), and while Europe, Brazil, and China look promising, the African bloc will probably back the incumbent, Togolese Gilbert Houngbo, who wants a second term. Also, Spain is simultaneously running Agriculture Minister Luis Planas for the FAO top job — and countries rarely win two UN top jobs at once.

• The English problem. The ILO conducts much of its business in English. A 2023 clip shows Díaz needing a translator for a reporter’s English question. Not a dealbreaker, but not…great.

What people are saying. Sánchez calls it “an honor“ and unions are enthusiastic. But Pablo Iglesias, her former lefty ally (remember him?), is predictably less of a fan. Díaz is getting the nomination to a well-paying job far from political pressure “for services rendered” to Sánchez’s government, he says. He also snipes that, with the ILO director salary of $239,200 a year, she’d be “the best-paid CCOO [union] member in history.” The PP, for its part, says it’s payback for keeping quiet on government scandals. 🤷

• What’s next? Candidacies close Aug. 14 and the ILO council votes Nov. 16. If she wins, she could stay on as minister until October 2027, though it’s unlikely this government will be around that long.

5. 🗿 A 5th century church! A 15 million year-old turtle! Spain keeps digging up fascinating old stuff

You know we’re big fans of Spanish archeological finds here at The Bubble. A Roman ship off the coast of Mallorca? Nos encanta. Julius Caesar’s elephant (maybe) under a Córdoba hospital? Grande. “Exotically rare” ancient Greek, Iberian and Roman coins in a storage locker in Baena? Gen-i-al. Well, we got a double dose of finds this week, so you can only imagine how giddy we are.

• The latest. Researchers have just published a long-awaited study on a 5th-century church in Murcia that kept functioning under Muslim rule until the 9th century. And construction workers in Madrid stumbled across the shell of a giant tortoise from 15 million years ago.

That’s an OLD church. Excavations at Cerro de la Virgen, a hilltop in Calasparra (Murcia) that’s home to the first paleochristian church documented in the region, began in 2021 and continued through 2024 and 2025.

• Kinda gruesome, no? The newly published study documents a single-nave church built around 410–440 A.D., architecturally similar to Visigothic churches in Asturias and early churches in Syria. Inside: a 6th-century double tomb with a young woman and a fetus whose DNA points to “a common maternal lineage” — i.e. mother and child (we hesitate to imagine the sad story here).

• Less gruesome. Also found were coins from several Roman emperors and an Abderramán III dirham, bronze Andalusian weights inscribed al-ʿadl li-llāh (”justice is of God”), and balance scales. Sounds like they might have also been running a corner store.

The church straddles several chapters of Spanish history. The church survived the Muslim conquest of 711 and kept going for nearly two more centuries, thanks to the Pact of Teodomiro (713), which let Christians in southeast Spain practice their faith in exchange for taxes (i.e. god for money). The weights and scales suggest the church also served as a tax-collection point (fine, not a take-out beer joint).

• The researchers’ conclusion. “The hill was a Christian community subjected to the taxes of the Islamic State and forced to integrate into the regional fiscal and commercial circuits.“ The find chips away at the traditional picture of a sharp break between Visigoth and Muslim Spain — reality, it seems, was more complex.

That’s a REALLY OLD turtle. Workers building a training center for Madrid’s emergency services in the Latina district found the shell of a Titanochelon bolivari — a giant land tortoise that roamed the Iberian Peninsula during the Miocene, more than 15 million years ago. Madrid’s deputy mayor Inma Sanz called it “absolutely amazing” (true, if obvious). The shell is now at the Museo Arqueológico Regional in Alcalá de Henares for study and conservation. Madrid has history with digging up old giants — another city project unearthed a mammoth 🦣!

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Plea dealing

🤦 Jeez, José Luis. With friends like these…

Ever had a terrible week where it felt like the world was against you and even your besties were out to bring you down? Well, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (aka ZP), the former prime minister from 2004-2011 (and BFF, at least until recently, of current PM Pedro Sánchez), just had that — ✖️1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣. Let us count the ways!

The Two Julios. ZP’s bad, no good, terrible week came courtesy of two men who happen to share a name — and, apparently, a strong preference for not going to prison if they can avoid it. They provided testimony to court this week in a sprawling corruption and money laundering probe linked to the controversial €53m government rescue of airline Plus Ultra during the pandemic (which ZP is accused of organizing behind the scenes — for a cut). And let’s just say if there was a bus in the vicinity, they definitely threw ZP under it.

The least believable claim. When ZP testified in court last month, he was extremely sure of himself, as in, “I did not speak with anyone, absolutely anyone from the public sector about the rescue of Plus Ultra. There will be no one who can say otherwise.” But oh, did these people say otherwise.

• Julio #1: Julio Martínez Martínez (”Julito”) — ZP’s longtime running buddy (literally: they jogged together nearly every day) and the administrator of a consultancy, Análisis Relevante, through which ZP collected plenty of money, ostensibly for “reports” based on his government experience. Julito had kept quiet since his arrest last December, but this week he went full-on Aldama — turning state’s evidence, in hopes of a sentence reduction, just like the star witness Víctor de Aldama scored in a previous corruption scandal (see: Caso Koldo). He told the judge that ZP ran Análisis Relevante from the shadows, off the books but pulling the strings on everything. ZP knew every step of the Plus Ultra bailout — and told Julito on Feb. 26, 2021, two full weeks before the official cabinet vote, that approval was coming. Oh, and ZP’s daughters were on the payroll too.

• Julio #2: Julio Martínez Sola, Plus Ultra’s president, plus ex-CEO Roberto Roselli: confessed in writing that they paid €530,000 in fake invoices as ZP’s 1% cut for making the bailout come true. The invoices described the money charged as being for “monthly advisory reports” that either didn’t exist or were, the executives admitted, “irrelevant.” Oh — and part of ZP’s payment came in the form of 46 unreimbursed business class flights. Because if you’re gonna set up a dodgy bailout for an airline, the least they can do is fly you in the Big Boy Seats.

How we got here. ZP and Julito met in 2011 when Julito bought ZP’s house in Vera, Almería — the sale was signed at La Moncloa while ZP was still PM (totally normal!). In 2019, they set up Análisis Relevante with ZP conspicuously off the paperwork. Clients included Venezuelan-linked businessmen, and eventually Plus Ultra. Along the way, police found €286,000 in cash at Julito’s home (hidden in a golf bag and behind a radiator because…where else?) and €1.3m in jewelry in ZP’s office safe. Routine stuff.

What the parties said.

• The PSOE-led government: Spokeswoman (and Minister of Inclusion) Elma Saiz said the dear folks in the government “continue to believe in his innocence.” Privately, PSOE figures are far less calm — one called the damage “irreparable” and warned the party cannot become ZP’s “political, emotional, or institutional shield.”

• Sumar: Yolanda Díaz backed the presumption of innocence but said ZP “has to give explanations.” Which, seriously, is about the least he could do.

• PP: Spokesperson Ester Muñoz called it a “chanchullo [scam] of Sánchez and Zapatero” that “can bring them both down.” The law of silence in the PSOE, she added, “no longer works.”

So, what happens next? The court described Julito’s testimony as “valuable“ but noted he was frustratingly vague on the key question we are all asking: who exactly did ZP lobby inside the government? (”I don’t know,” said Julito, somewhat unhelpfully.) Plus Ultra’s president and ex-CEO will testify in person — but not until after August. ZP still hasn’t explained the jewelry. And his legal team’s bid to throw out the evidence gathered from people’s phones as unconstitutionally obtained got kneecapped when Julito confirmed the messages in open court.

• If there were a contract on Kalshi, we’d put money on ZP going down. Actually, there are markets on Kalshi and Polymarket, though neither has him being arrested in 2026. But, slowly, painfully, one deposition at a time, we bet on him taking the fall.

More news below. 👇👇

🔔 Don’t miss the latest episode of The Bubble Podcast!

Episode 3 of The Bubble Podcast is out! We discuss the potential PP-Vox national coalition with political scientist Pablo Simón and whether it’s easy for foreigners to make friends in Spain.

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

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🏆 The National Football Team celebrated winning the World Cup with 2M people in Madrid

Do you feel that? It’s called an emotional hangover, and it’s what we’re all feeling this week after the epic, nail-biting Sunday night we all had. And if you thought Spain was done celebrating after beating Argentina, think again.

• Madrid on Monday turned into one ginormous victory parade as millions of people (seriously, millions) flooded the streets to welcome home the new world champions. The partying started in New Jersey, with Donald Trump apparently now saying it’s all good with Pedro Sánchez 🥳, before arriving in Madrid, where the world champions landed on Monday afternoon.

• They headed to the Royal Palace of Zarzuela to meet with King Felipe VI (aka F6), Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía, who greeted each player individually. Wunderkind Lamine Yamal, who the King seems to have a soft spot for, broke protocol and gave him a bro hug, which they both seemed to enjoy. It didn’t really feel like a formal state reception, which is good.

• The players’ outfits raised a few eyebrows because they looked like they had borrowed an oversized suit from their parents. Turns out it’s an exclusive outfit designed by Loewe that costs €4,730 each (proof we know nothing about fashion).

The team then headed to La Moncloa to meet with PM Sánchez. Rodri carried the trophy into the gardens before the squad posed for the now mandatory photo on the steps of the presidential palace.

• Looking forward. Sánchez congratulated them and, since we’re set to co-host the 2030 World Cup alongside Portugal and Morocco, he joked about Spain winning another one in four years. (Jesus, dude, let them at least get a good night's sleep).

Road trip. The players then climbed aboard an open-top bus and slowly made their way through Madrid to Plaza Cibeles (i.e., city hall).

• The streets were packed from hours beforehand, and the mood on the bus was… festive. Borja Iglesias handled DJ duties, the team drank alcoholic beverages, the trophy was passed from player to player, and internet boyfriend Ferran Torres (more on him below) chose to wear a red cap reading “Make Spain Great Again”, which many interpreted as a nod to Trump (we, however, suspect trolling).

Partay! By the time the bus rolled into Cibeles around 10 p.m., Madrid had become one giant sea of red. Authorities estimate that roughly two million people lined the streets throughout the afternoon, while around 120,000 fans packed into Cibeles itself for the final celebration.

• The champions walked onto the stage one by one to songs they had personally chosen (see video above). Rodri acted as MC and coach Luis de la Fuente got an emotional standing ovation (he is a really nice guy, after all).

• Oh, and maybe-MAGA Ferran Torres (who scored the only goal against Argentina) was celebrated as a hero.

Superstars. To close the night, it felt almost inevitable that the party would finish with the players singing the unofficial anthem of Spain’s campaign, Aitana’s Superestrella (aka the song of the summer).

• Then Aitana hopped on stage and sang it too while everyone (players included) jumped around in excitement.

Good kids. Judging from the last few weeks, the Spanish team might be world champions, but they still come across as remarkably grounded.

• We’re muy proud. 😍

2. 👨🏻‍⚖️ Brussels gave Sánchez a win over Catalonia separatists’ amnesty

Great news (for some)! After almost three years, Spain’s divisive amnesty law has finally been settled. Many people hated it and said it was unconstitutional and hoped Brussels would eventually strike it down. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

• Big day. The EU's highest court ruled on Thursday that the amnesty law does not violate EU law, handing Sánchez a political and legal victory—and bringing Catalan separatist (and outlaw) leader Carles Puigdemont one step closer to returning to Spain.

• Recap. Back in 2017, Catalonia held an illegal independence referendum despite Spain’s Constitutional Court saying it was unconstitutional. Then-Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont fled to Belgium to avoid arrest, and some Catalan leaders were jailed while Spain spent years locked in a bitter political and judicial battle.

• Sánchez failed to win a majority in the 2023 elections and needed the support of Puigdemont’s right-wing Junts separatist party to repeat as PM, so he agreed to pass an amnesty law (something he said he wouldn't do) that would erase criminal responsibility for hundreds of people linked to the independence push between 2011 and 2023. He says the goal is to help ease tensions between Madrid and Catalonia (and help him be PM, of course).

Implementation hasn’t been simple. While many lower courts have applied the law, Spain’s Supreme Court has refused to grant amnesty to Puigdemont himself, arguing that the alleged misuse of public funds during the referendum should not be covered (hence why he’s still living in Belgium).

Enter the EU. The Court of Justice of the European Union examined two major questions Spanish courts had sent to Luxembourg: does the amnesty violate EU financial rules? And does it conflict with European anti-terrorism legislation? The answer was “no” to both.

• The Sánchez government celebrated the ruling, and Catalan regional president Salvador Illa (a non-separatist socialist) said there are now “no more excuses” and demanded Spanish courts apply the law immediately.

• The PP wasn’t as happy. While they said they respected the ruling, they insisted nothing had changed politically. Their argument remains that Sánchez traded legal impunity for parliamentary votes (which is true, but not against EU rules).

Poochie not in the clear. Despite celebrating what he called “a resounding victory”, Puigdemont (pronounced pooch-the-mont, aka poochie) still can’t come home.

• Local issues. Spain’s Supreme Court (which leans right) continues to argue that Poochie’s alleged misuse of Spanish public money falls outside the amnesty because it constituted a personal financial benefit—an issue the EU ruling didn’t resolve (it only ruled in the context of EU, not local, law). So, his arrest warrant remains active. 🚔

• Poochie is pissed off frustrated by the delay, so he has now filed a complaint before the European Commission, accusing Spanish institutions of refusing to properly apply European law.

Ball in Spain’s court. The decisive battle now moves to the Constitutional Court (which leans right), which is expected to rule this fall. Expect it to rule in Poochie's favor.

3. 👰🏻 Ferrán Torres is the internet’s new boyfriend, and he has tons of lovers (and haters too)

If you are terminally online like we are, chances are you are now turned on by in love with Ferrán Torres, the 26-year-old F.C. Barcelona forward who has become the face of Spain’s World Cup victory, not just because he scored the winner against Argentina, but because, well... have you seen him? The hair. The smile. The jawline. (And yes, the queerbaiting.) Social media has collectively lost its mind.

• The Ferran fan club now includes just about everyone. The ladies. The gays. Even plenty of straight guys seem perfectly comfortable admitting that Spain’s World Cup hero is ridiculously good-looking.

• While international media is already treating him like football’s newest heartthrob, poor Ferran is also dealing with some negativity at home. It’s been quite the week.

💘 The love. Ladies, he’s single! However, The Sun (as in, the tabloid, yes) reports that he spent Spain’s World Cup after-party flirting with singer Ana Mena after the pair were spotted together throughout the celebrations.

😡 The hate. Because this is Spain, the honeymoon didn’t last very long. First came the “Make Spain Great Again” cap that he wore and the suspicions surrounding why he wore it. Then came the housing controversy.

• A buitre too? A spokesperson for left-wing party Sumar publicly accused Ferran of being a housing speculator, claiming his investment company owned around 20 homes and comparing it to a “vulture fund” while arguing for tougher housing laws. The story quickly spread across local media — until other outlets started digging into the details.

• Or not. According to El Español, it’s fake news as the accusation appears to be based on a misunderstanding. The news site says Ferran does not own 20 homes. Instead, most of his assets reportedly consist of office spaces, with only four residential properties in his portfolio. At the time of writing, the competing claims haven’t yet been independently fact-checked, so we’ll hold off on declaring a winner in that particular internet fight.

And just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder... A mural painted in Barcelona by famous street artist TV Boy, celebrating Ferran kissing the World Cup trophy, lasted less than 24 hours before it was vandalized with pro-independence slogans and “Puta Espanya” graffiti.

• Some separatist figures had openly encouraged people to deface it after Spain’s victory celebrations filled Catalan streets with Spanish flags.

Oh, well… In other words, welcome back to normal Spanish politics. (Ferran, we still stan you).

4. 🚬 One more nail in smoking’s coffin

You’ll remember Spain’s first anti-smoking law in 2005, if you’re of a certain age (like, old). You’ll also remember that people said it could never work — Spaniards would never stop lighting up in bars and restaurants, because that’s what they do. And yet, it worked. The rate fell from 33% then to about 20% today, and the hospitality industry’s predictions of ruin never materialized. And now, the government has gone back for more.

What happened: The cabinet of PM Sánchez approved a sweeping new tobacco bill on Tuesday — the biggest overhaul of anti-smoking legislation in over a decade — and sent it to Parliament. The key new measures:

• Terraces, beaches, and beyond. Bar and restaurant terraces, beaches (sea and river), swimming pools, national parks, sports facilities, and even outdoor events like concerts (‼️) all go smoke-free.

• Fifteen-metre buffer zones around sensitive spaces, like schools, hospitals, universities, museums, libraries, and children’s parks.

• Minors banned from smoking — not just from buying, which was already the rule. Parents or guardians pay the €200–600 fine when their kids are caught, though it can be swapped for community service.

• Vapes equated with cigarettes. E-cigarettes, shishas, and nicotine-free devices face the same restrictions as tobacco and can only be sold in specialist shops — not convenience stores, not bazaars, not vending machines.

• An advertising wipeout. No ads online, on TV, or in shop windows. Presenters and influencers can no longer be shown vaping or smoking on screen.

A brief history. The 2005 law banned smoking in enclosed spaces but let bars keep designated smoking rooms. The industry worked hard to preserve that loophole, but in 2011 it was closed. Hospitality groups predicted catastrophe, which…never came. Spain went from 9.6 million smokers in 2010 to 7.9 million a decade later, while cigarette pack sales fell from 4.6 billion in 2005 to 2.2 billion in 2022 (tourists obviously bought a few).

The new bill still has to survive Parliament, where the government needs the support of PP or Junts — neither of which has committed to ‘yes’. The PP has concerns about the terrace ban’s economic impact on hospitality because, you know, people like a smoke with a caña.

• Two things were notably absent from the final text — mandated plain packaging (blocked by the PSOE; Sumar plans to add it by amendment) and a ban on disposable vapes (awaiting an EU ruling). No matter what, smoking’s running out of breath.

5. 🫢 That nude crowd photographer is coming to the Canaries

Ever had the urge to wander around a photo shoot in the Canary Islands, buck-assed naked except for being painted head to toe in rainbow colors? Well, it’s your chance! Because Spencer Tunick — the photographer of tons of nude people being all comfortable with their not overly gymed-up bodies — is coming to town.

• What’s going on? On July 26 (aka Sunday), Tunick will descend on Gran Canaria for Gran Spectrum, a mass participation installation in which hundreds of volunteers will have their bodies painted in the colors of various LGBTQIA+ flags and then pose across Las Palmas and Maspalomas.

• Backers. The project is backed by the Cabildo de Gran Canaria and the Canaries government as part of the Culture & Business Pride 2026 festival. Participants get a limited-edition print of the final image. The number of participants? That will be secret until the day.

Who is he, anyway? Tunick started in New York in the 1990s, photographing solo nudes in empty early-morning streets. (You could do nude photos in public there, as long as they were for artistic purposes.) One day he realized he had more than 70 people’s numbers and thought, why not get them all together naked at once?

• United Naked Nations. The first group shoot — 28 people outside the UN in New York — told him he was onto something. He’s since done 4,500–7,000 people in Barcelona (2003) and a record 18,000–20,000 in Mexico City (2007). (South Korea and Taiwan shot down other big shoots.) He tried Gran Canaria’s neighbor Tenerife a decade ago — it fell through; he says he can’t remember why.

What’s new? This shoot is more explicitly political than most of his work, a response to the anti-LGBTQIA+ climate in the U.S.: “There’s a lot of misinformation from the government, and it’s generating fear and violence.”

• Another twist. The body paint also pushes things further into abstraction — Tunick calls what he does “abstract paintings with bodies in public space,” citing Yayoi Kusama and Ellsworth Kelly as influences. Less photography, more collective sculpture. And bottoms and stuff.

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Oh, brother

🚔 PM Sánchez's brother just made history (for all the wrong reasons)

Just in time for the summer holidays. Spain has never had a prime minister’s brother sentenced by a court before, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. David Sánchez — musician, opera buff, and yes, the little brother of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — has been banned from holding public office for nine years after being found guilty of “administrative misconduct” related to his hiring in 2017 at the Badajoz Provincial Council for a, um, job that required no work but did come with a paycheck.

• Not just him. Ten (10!) other defendants got the same sentence, while Miguel Ángel Gallardo, the former head of the council and former leader of Extremadura’s Socialist Party, got hit hardest — 18 years for two counts of malfeasance.

• But, but. but. The court ruled out influence peddling, the original core accusation (and one that comes with prison), saying it wasn’t proven. But the nepotism? Apparently yes.

• Is “administrative misconduct” a big deal? Well, it’s certainly another headache for PM Sánchez, that’s for sure. This is the fourth member of his inner circle to be convicted of something in under a year — after his attorney general Álvaro García Ortiz, former minister José Luis Ábalos, and former socialist party bigwig Santos Cerdán — and it comes while his wife, Begoña Gómez, waits to hear if she’ll face trial, and former PM and ally José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is in the midst of a corruption scandal. It’s just not a good look.

How it started. Back in 2016-2017, Badajoz’s council (then run by Sánchez ally Gallardo) created a brand-new high-level post — coordinator of the province’s music conservatories. David Sánchez got it.

• The charge. The court has found that the job was designed with the sole purpose of giving it to the brother of the now-PM (who was just a PSOE grandee then), with an administrative file built afterward to dress the decision in legalese.

• Evidence. Emails uncovered by the Civil Guard’s anti-corruption unit (UCO) referred to him internally as “el hermanísimo” (the “supreme brother”). In 2022, the job got renamed “Head of the Performing Arts Office,” which the court says was really just a tailor-made adjustment so he could keep pursuing his opera career without showing up to an office.

Not a great look. David Sánchez took the stand at trial and, by most accounts, didn’t do himself any favors. As we all saw in those cringe-inducing videos, his statement barely shed any light on how he actually landed the job. Oh, and at one point, he struggled to explain what his daily responsibilities were.

• No defense. Since he refused to say much during the trial, the prosecutors’ star witnesses, two UCO officers who’d spent months poring over intercepted emails, went largely unchallenged.

Official response. Fury, basically. The PSOE’s line, echoed by ministers and regional leaders, is that this is a “hunt” against the PM via his family. Transport Minister and Sánchez pit bull Óscar Puente called it an attempt to “topple a government that can’t be beaten at the ballot box” (though it has been very eager to avoid the ballot box, but that's another story…).

The right’s reaction. PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo, unsurprisingly, is enjoying this one. He called it a “historic” day for Spain’s rule of law, tweeting that “nobody is above the law, whatever family they belong to.”

• Who has “mafia” on their bingo card? Far-right Vox’s Santiago Abascal, never one for subtlety, called the whole government “a mafia.”

About that “lawfare” thing. Legally, David Sánchez wasn’t found guilty of trading on his brother’s influence. The court explicitly said that the charge wasn’t proven and stressed that nepotism, while ethically rotten, wasn’t automatically a crime unless it fits a specific criminal statute.

• That distinction makes the verdict look goofy to Sánchez supporters. And it’s a card the government is playing. The “lawfare” narrative — the idea that judges and prosecutors are being used as a political weapon against a government — is a belief genuinely held by many PSOE voters and officials.

• But, but, but… David Sánchez’s lawyer says “there’s no reason” to think lawfare had anything to do with the verdict and warns that his client will appeal.

Politically, it won’t change much. It barely matters whether the charge was influence peddling or malfeasance. Sánchez will keep marching ahead with his sights set on postponing elections until the last minute possible (that's mid-2027).

More news below. 👇👇

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🛃 Gibraltar and Spain are one again! (Fine, we’re exaggerating)

Back together after all these years! One hundred and seventeen years after it was built by the English, 57 years after it was weaponized by Franco to blockade Gibraltar, and 44 years after it was reopened in part by Prime Minister Felipe González, the verja — the border fence — of Gibraltar is coming down.

• Why? At its root, this is a Brexit fix: Gibraltar voted 96% to stay in the EU in 2016, then found itself stranded outside Schengen when some geniuses in the U.K. decided to leave anyway.

• The treaty. Tuesday in Brussels, EU commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and U.K. Secretary of State Stephen Doughty signed a 1,117-page agreement defining Gibraltar’s post-Brexit relationship with Spain, with Spain’s foreign minister José Manuel Albares and Gibraltar’s Chief Minister Fabián Picardo watching on. It entered provisional force at midnight.

What changes. The 15,000 Spanish workers who commute into Gibraltar daily no longer have to queue for passport checks at the land border. But Gibraltar still says it’s a self-governing territory, and Spain still wants it back, Albares and Picardo confirmed.

• But, but, but… Gibraltar is now, practically speaking, inside the EU’s Schengen zone. Passport controls have moved to the airport, where Spain’s Policía Nacional will run EU entry/exit checks mirroring the St Pancras model, where French police check Eurostar passengers on British soil.

• No more tax dodging? Gibraltar is also shedding its tax haven status after 35 years: a new VAT starts at 15% and rises to 17% over three years. Making it almost, kind of, a little bit part of Europe.

Boots, yes or no. Picardo had spent years insisting Spanish police on Gibraltarian soil — “boots on the ground” — would never happen. The solution: a joint facility at the airport, straddling the border.

• You say shack, I say policía on The Rock. Picardo calls it the Schengen shack. “The boots will be contained within that,” he said. The mayor of the Spanish town of La Línea was more philosophical. “Everyone has to give a little. And obviously, if you’re going to enter Schengen via a land border with Spain — who is going to check you?” he asked the FT. “The Lithuanian police?”

What’s next? Provisional is the key word. The treaty needs formal ratification by the EU and the U.K. to become permanent. Picardo has said Gibraltarians will also have the right to vote in a referendum on whether to terminate the agreement in the future. History, as they say, is long.

2. 🔥 Why was the fire in Almería so deadly?

The sudden, deadly fire in Almería that claimed 13 victims riveted the eyes of the world, from the U.S. and Britain to France, Australia, and beyond. And as Andalucía dug out from the destruction and identified the victims, a giant question hung over the tragedy: How did such a relatively small fire become so deadly, so quickly?

• What happened. Shortly after 4:30 p.m. on July 9, a fire broke out near Los Gallardos, apparently from a downed electrical wire — though the power companies say the wires weren’t live. In less than two hours, the fire had traveled nearly 10 miles.

• Victims. By Sunday, when it was finally stabilized, 13 people were dead: four British, three Belgian, one French, one Spanish, and three still unidentified — most of them foreign retirees in isolated hillside homes around Bédar, a village of 973 residents, more than half of them foreign.

A small fire. The fire burned between 3,200 and 7,000 hectares — a fraction of the dozen-plus Spanish fires exceeding 20,000 hectares since 1968. So what caused such a tragedy?

• The weather. An El País analysis shows a rare triple combination — 38°C, 12% humidity, wind gusts above 40 km/h — matched only twice in all Julys recorded since 2015. Spain’s minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, said the fire advanced at 100 meters per minute: “We have never seen such ferocity here.”

• No warning. Andalusian authorities did not activate the national mobile alert system, saying different areas needed different instructions and it couldn’t target scattered communities precisely enough. Many foreign residents — isolated, some with limited Spanish — turned to Facebook groups instead. Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, the son of Stanislas, a Belgian victim, was blunt: “The people who died did not disobey any order because no order was given.” (Andaluz authorities say some residents ignored evacuation instructions.)

• The trap. Seven victims followed what seemed like an escape route from El Curato — actually a dead-end track a beekeeper used to tend his hives. They were found at four in the morning. Two survived with serious injuries.

• The deeper problem. Bédar’s hillsides are full of isolated homes — many built by British immigrants over decades, some legally, some less so, in areas with no mandatory evacuation plans. Locals also say they’ve been blocked or fined for clearing brush. One neighbor’s goats, grazing the hillsides all year, apparently contained the fire where the authorities didn’t, or wouldn’t.

In Bédar. The town has opened an emergency office to help survivors with paperwork and claims. Hunters and volunteers are laying food and water across the scorched hillsides for surviving wildlife — tortoises, which cannot outrun fire, are being collected. Three bodies remain unidentified. “About the fire,” the village pharmacist said, “there is only one thing to talk about: those who are gone.”

3. 🇫🇷 Former PM Rajoy apologizes to no one, fools!

Former PM Mariano Rajoy (2011 to 2018) has a talent for opening his mouth and stuffing his foot in it. For example, last week, days before Spain played France in the World Cup semifinal, he managed to offend an entire country with half a sentence, outdoing himself once again.

• Mouth, meet foot. In his regular column for El Debate, Rajoy praised France’s squad as playing at “a very high level”, but added “sin franceses.” Without French people.

• An explanation for the hard of thinking: he meant the French national team doesn’t really count as French. Is it because, uhm, many of the players don’t look like they belong to the Gallic Roman Empire? 🤔 Unclear. Actually, clear. To us (and, honestly, many others), there was only one way to read it: skin color and family history define who is French.

• Fun fact. 23 of the team's 26 players were born in France. The other three are naturalized French citizens. So, what's up? Hmmm. Many are of African ancestry. Maybe that was it? Again: 🤔

Whoopsie. Once the column was published, it caught fire on both sides of the Pyrenees. Turns out such, ahem, “controversial” logic is the same as the far-right Front National used back in 1998.

• Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right party back then dismissed France’s World Cup-winning squad (Zidane, Thuram, Desailly, Vieira) as not representing the “real” France because too many players were Black or descended from immigrants from former French colonies. Faux pas!

How things have changed. This time, everyone in France — yes, including the far right — was furious. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said that “France doesn’t have a skin color,” adding that any claim otherwise is “stupidity, racism, or both.” Sacré bleu!

• Spain enters the group chat. PM Pedro Sánchez didn’t hold back from taking an easy layup on the guy he tossed out of office, posting that Spain “belongs to whoever loves it and works for it, not to whoever embarrasses it with xenophobic statements.”

• Easy shots. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares demanded PP leader Feijóo publicly disown Rajoy. Transport Minister Óscar Puente (aka Sánchez's social media troll) called Rajoy a “post-Francoist idiot” (because when in doubt, say "Franco").

Relax, guy! The PP, not being good at easy things, instead ran defense. Spokesperson Borja Sémper insisted the comment was “sarcastic.” Now, that argument raises an obvious question: sarcastic about what, exactly? The PP never actually explained what the joke was supposed to be; they just kept repeating that it was one. Haha? 🤔

• What Rajoy said next. After Spain beat France to reach the final, Rajoy wrote a follow-up column — praising France’s team, praising Spain’s team, and notably not apologizing for anything.

• Look over there. Instead, he accused the Spanish government of manufacturing outrage to “distract attention” from things that actually matter to Spaniards, complaining that officials had preferred to “snitch to a foreign minister” (⁉️).

We’re not sure Rajoy knows how the internet works. Actually, we're sure he doesn't.

4. 💩 TV meltdown ends with journalist saying she’d ‘rather eat sh*t’

What is happening? Spanish TV had an awkward moment last weekend that nobody saw coming — with a panelist breaking down in tears, quoting Gabriel García Márquez, and walking off set mid-broadcast.

• What happened. During Saturday night’s Malas Lenguas, journalist Marta Gómez Montero told host Jesús Cintora she wouldn’t answer his question, said she felt humiliated, started crying, and then delivered the quote of the week.

• Woah. Invoking the ending of García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, where a starving woman asks her husband what they’ll eat and he answers “shit”, she told Cintora she’d rather eat shit than be humiliated by him again. Then she got up and left the studio, live, mid-show. Epic 🎤-drop.

What is Malas Lenguas, anyway? It’s Cintora’s political talk show on La 2 (TVE’s second public channel), built around a panel of journalists and commentators hashing out the day’s news — usually all talking at the same time, Spanish tertulia style.

• Awkward. On the Saturday night edition (which has been climbing the primetime ratings), Cintora asks uncomfortable questions meant to generate friction.

Montero snaps. The topic was Feijóo’s recent comments on labor absenteeism (which we covered last week). Montero, who leans conservative, was defending a softer reading of his remarks, insisting he’d only targeted fraudulent sick leave, not sick workers generally.

• When Cintora pushed the panel on Feijóo’s harder line about Spain being a “subsidized country,” Montero seemed visibly tense. Then the dam broke, with Montero giving an exhausted admission that she’d tolerated this “to pay the bills” and “for her kids” and couldn’t anymore.

• Cintora’s response could have been better. “What’s wrong with you, Marta? She’s decided to leave — she’ll know why,” he told the camera before moving on to the next panelist as if nothing had happened.

• Cintora later interrupted the broadcast again as social media reaction exploded, insisting he’d only gestured for Montero to wait her turn and that he didn’t understand what had triggered the reaction — while still inviting her back “with affection.”

We’re sowwy. RTVE president José Pablo López stepped in the next day, posting his own public apology and support for Montero, calling her an excellent professional and person.

• Me too. Cintora also posted a public apology on X, calling Montero “a good journalist and colleague” and saying the show’s doors remained open to her.

• Opposition chimes in. PP spokesperson Ester Muñoz accused the show of “constant on-air humiliation and mistreatment, paid for with our money,” framing it as punishment for Montero not following a pro-Sánchez line.

Montero returns. On Monday night, she was back, saying, “We’re human, and there are days you have an impulse.” She added she was reassured by López’s and Cintora’s reactions.

• The two shook hands on camera, and the show moved on to its regular news lineup. As far as we know, no one had to eat anything they didn’t want to.

5. 🐂 New movie idea: Joker: Folie à…Bulls?

Fine, we admit it. We tune in every morning to the TV broadcast of the running of the bulls during San Fermín, which is either a beautiful expression of Pamplona culture or a frat party with animals. Usually there’s one doofus who makes it clear he doesn’t know what he’s doing by wearing, like, a ninja costume or by slapping a bull in the head. But this year, that doofus was even doofier. He was…the Joker?

• Wait, what? If you watched the encierros, you couldn’t help but catch sight of a guy with green hair, white face paint, a sinister red smile, and metal teeth. Full-on Joker, Joaquin Phoenix-style. But with the traditional white clothes and red pañuelo, natch.

The Joker’s name is Lacey Mrzena. He’s a social media influencer from Chicago — some version of @straightdroplace on the socials — and he came to Pamplona to run with the bulls dressed as the comic-book supervillain. Which is something he does at a lot of other iconic events and locations (Mardi Gras, mariachis of Garibaldi, etc).

Dedicated prankster. Mrzena tried to run every single encierro at this year’s San Fermines. (There are eight, for non-obsessives.) He also ran the vaquillas afterward, where a young cow knocked him to the ground on day four, to sustained crowd applause.

• Not everyone was amused. Thing is, the San Fermines have rules, and Lacey didn’t follow them. On day five, he filmed himself next to a bull’s horns (filming is a big no-no because it’s, um, dangerous as shit for you and everyone else), got fined up to €6,000 and banned from the next run, ruining his goal of eight. Then, on day seven, he climbed onto a balcony on the Plaza Consistorial and was pulled down by the police.

• Lynch mob (not quite). After the final encierro, local runners confronted him in the street — “You’re a stupid boy. This is serious” — and police stepped in and detained him before the crowd turned. While being led away, he pretended he was handcuffed, fell to the street, and started shouting “I can’t breathe” à la George Floyd (in very poor taste, in our opinion).

Lacey’s defense? He was not filming, he said, and was being discriminated against. “Fake news” made him a target, he added. He titled one post “Prison Break 2026” and claimed his costume was justified by “religious and cultural reasons.” (We love Joaquin Phoenix too, but we’re pretty sure that’s not a religion.)

• The dress-up was fine, guy. The encierro ordinance runs eight pages. It bans phones, backpacks, and inappropriate footwear. So he did break the phone rule. But it says nothing about dressing as the Joker.

Here he is, just having his fun:

@straightdroplace1@Marta Armada Ruiz @caanxus @Lola Enríquez #love #spain #straightdroplace

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Starting the engines

🥊 Spain's right prepares its election platform for 2027

Something is shifting in Spain’s political landscape this week. A series of proposals, statements, and deals involving the Partido Popular (PP) shows the party edging further right, both rhetorically and strategically, as it tries to both prepare for 2027 elections (a centrist affair) while at the same time holding off the far-right Vox.

Hint: It's not a pretty dance.

• The move. Led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative party has tried to position itself as a moderate, center-right alternative to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE. In recent days, however, it has increasingly operated in terrain that is traditionally dominated by Vox.

Let us count the ways.

1️⃣ The child not yet born has entered the debate. The clearest example of this is Feijóo’s promise this week to take Madrid’s “Unborn Child Law” nationwide.

• Pre-birth benefits. The law, recently passed by Madrid’s regional government, led by presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP), allows an unborn child to be counted as a member of the family for administrative purposes. As in, families can access public aid for housing, education, tax benefits and the like, from around week 14 of pregnancy.

• The argument. The PP says the move will help families have children by making the economics more possible.

• The drama. It’s controversial to some because it looks like a step toward an idea promoted by anti-abortion groups — that a fetus should be treated as a person with rights.

• The criticism. While the law stops short of granting fetuses full legal personhood, which would require changing Spain’s Civil Code and clash with Constitutional Court doctrine, critics argue it normalizes an idea that could eventually justify restricting abortion.

The big deal. The PP says it will not roll back Spain’s abortion law, which was upheld in 2023. But some on the left are painting this as a slippery slope and a way to shift the cultural baseline without triggering immediate legal backlash.

• Far-right chimes in. Vox, for its part, is delighted — but not satisfied. The party supports the law while pushing for something more radical: full legal recognition of the unborn, which would directly challenge abortion rights.

2️⃣ “Cancer” comparisons = bad. Feijóo told business leaders that workers’ absenteeism is a “cancer” that costs Spain more than €30bn a year. He also questioned why workers on sick leave should earn the same as those working.

Reality check. Before you ask, yes, Spain does have a real absenteeism problem. Around 4.5% of workers are on sick leave, nearly double the EU average, and public spending on it has surged to €18.4bn annually.

• Why? The data is complex — linked to an aging workforce, long waiting lists in public healthcare, and rising mental health issues. Honestly, we don't know exactly why rates are so high.

Cue the outrage. Feijóo's suggestion of effectively reducing pay during sick leave touched a nerve. Critics (i.e., Sánchez and government-allied unions) accused him of targeting vulnerable workers and encouraging people to work while ill.

• The walkback. The PP walked back Feijóo's words a bit yesterday, with party officials saying he was referring only to fraudulent cases, not genuinely sick workers. 😒

3️⃣ A new, new deal. The PP formalized yet another agreement with Vox to form a coalition government, this time in Andalucía. The part that matters? It includes Vox's “national priority”, a concept that prioritizes access to public services for people with local ties rather than newcomers (i.e., mostly immigrants).

• Leaning further right. On migration, the agreement rejects the redistribution of unaccompanied minors and undocumented immigrants, tightens controls on immigrants, and promotes the return of some to their countries of origin — policies that closely mirror Vox’s agenda.

How do the far-righties like it? Vox’s reaction to all this is…complex, and its official stance depends on your media diet.

• Happy! The party is pleased, according to the right-leaning El Mundo. Feijóo’s apparent shift validates its stance, and relations between the two parties are now described as a “fully extended hand”.

• Sad! Other media (notably the left-leaning El País) suggest something else: Vox actually prefers a stronger, more centrist PP, so the two parties can fight divide the right-leaning electorate and maximize the right-wing vote.

And the polls? If this is a strategy, it may be working. Recent polls show the PP and Vox holding a double-digit lead over the left, with the conservative bloc ahead by more than 12 points. Some projections even suggest Sánchez’s coalition could collapse to just over 110 seats — a historic low.

• Tail wagging the dog. At the end of the day, it feels like Feijóo is following, not leading, his rivals.

More news below. 👇👇

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Episode 2 of The Bubble Podcast is out! We talk about true crime (maybe), how to enjoy this summer’s verbenas, and mistakes foreigners make when moving to Spain.

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🧯NATO drama puts Spain in the spotlight (again!)

Family gathering. This week’s NATO summit in Ankara was supposed to focus on defense, military spending, and the alliance’s response to instability in the Middle East. Instead, it turned into a political spectacle both in Turkey and here in Spain.

Make Spain pay again. Ahead of the summit, Donald Trump (aka the 🍊 Menace) escalated his feud with Spain, calling it a “terrible partner” and even suggesting the U.S. would cut off trade entirely.

• Frustrated! The orange fella's frustration stems from PM Sánchez's refusal to sign up to NATO’s long-term military spending targets or allow the U.S. to use joint bases in Spain in its campaign against Iran.

• Sorry, Don! In reality, Trump’s trade threat means squat has little chance of succeeding. Spain cannot negotiate trade independently as EU policy is set in Brussels. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also stepped in to defend Spain, highlighting that it has now reached the basic 2% defense spending benchmark (which is true, although he credited Trump for it).

• Did you watch the game? PM Sánchez, meanwhile, opted for de-escalation, describing his interactions with Trump during the summit as “cordial” (“we talked about football and golf”) and insisting that relations remain strong. 💝

Hell froze over. Back in Spain, Vox leader Santiago Abascal made the (very) unusual move of publicly criticizing his supreme leader pal Trump — not over Spain, but over… Italy?

• Trump’s relationship with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni isn’t doing so great after he said she had begged him for a photo and she denied it. Ahead of the summit, he mocked her, suggesting he needed a restraining order to keep her away.

• Fine, I'll say something. Abascal, who has avoided criticizing Trump in the past, this time called the comments “absolutely unacceptable” and warned that allies should not treat each other “like vassals”. Is Vox souring on Trump? 🤔

Begoña, literally grounded. A domestic subplot added an extra layer to the NATO drama. Begoña Gómez, the indicted wife of PM Sánchez, was denied permission to travel to Ankara to attend the summit due to ongoing legal troubles and restrictions, including the seizure of her passport two weeks ago.

• Not needed. Despite an official invitation, the court argued that her presence was not essential. However, the court let her travel to Britain to attend her daughter’s graduation, citing stronger judicial cooperation there in case she tried to flee.

• Not a table for two? When Sánchez landed in Ankara on Tuesday, he was given two bouquets of flowers — including one that local media said was for his wife. Hopefully, they make it alive to Madrid. 💐

2. 📸 It’s a clothing line. It’s a PR campaign. It’s…DMOCRACIA!

A bunch of attractive influencers wearing unattractive brown-and-gray streetwear sweats vamping through the parliament building with classical-ish cello music in the background, ending with the slogan DMOCRACIA: “When you get dressed, you position yourself.”

• It seems pretty innocuous (if a little tacky), right? Well, it triggered a lotta people, most (though not all) on the right.

What’s the dealio? The campaign marks an anniversary the Sánchez government was determined to hit with a bang: 50 years since Franco’s death. The Spain in Freedom commission — a government body set up for the occasion — wanted to reach young Spaniards who didn’t live through the dictatorship and may not think much about it.

• Rather than a documentary, they hired streetwear designer Bnomio, recruited 32 influencers including Marina Rivers (2.2m Insta followers), shot a video inside the actual Congress chamber, and launched what looks exactly like a clothing brand — hoodies, sweats, the number “50” stitched on everything — called DMOCRACIA.

The government wants to be clear, though, that this is not a clothing brand but a PR campaign. Either way, it’s generated the controversy of an actual outré brand launch, and then some.

Two controversies, actually.

• The first? The shoot in Congress. It was approved by parliament’s (government-controlled) board — the government notes in its statement — but the right is treating it as institutional desecration nonetheless.

• And second, the cost. Media repeatedly cited €14.6m, which is actually the budget for the broader España en Libertad program. The DMOCRACIA campaign itself, the government says, cost “just” €386,000 — €185k for production, €193k for social media distribution, and €10k for design and creative direction.

Now for the best part. The clothes are not actually for sale. The limited run was made for events and influencer shoots only. Want a hoodie? Enter the giveaway — follow the government’s Instagram, like the post, share it to your stories, and you might be one of 20 lucky winners to receive a full kit. The Sánchez administration, in other words, is juicing its social media numbers using democracy-branded merch as bait.

• Which brings us to the obvious comparison. When Bad Bunny made his housing short film, it landed because it kinda felt like a genuine artist channeling something real. DMOCRACIA, whatever its intentions, feels like a government committee watching Conejo Malo and thinking, “Dude, we can do that.”

3. 🚨 Big week for famous crooks in Spain — one caught, one set free

You win some, you lose some. But there was a kind of poetic justice to it, or maybe a dharmic cosmic balance.

• What happened? El Pequeño Nicolás — convicted four times, 12+ years in combined sentences — avoided prison once again, while All Boivin, Canada’s most wanted man, was caught in Marbella.

First, Little Nicky. Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias became Spain’s most notorious con man in 2014, when he was 20 years old and had somehow infiltrated the inner circles of the Spanish state — hobnobbing with businessmen, attending official events, and turning up at the proclamation of King Felipe VI, where he was photographed with the monarch. 🤷

• Darling Nicky achieved all this while posing as an advisor to the CNI (like the CIA + FBI), the Presidencia del Gobierno, and basically any institution with impressive letterhead. He also arranged for a friend to take his university entrance exam in his name using a fake ID, which suggests his fraud was not particularly sophisticated.

Four convictions followed, and he received a combined 12+ years in prison. But but but… he has not spent a day in prison. This week, a Madrid court suspended his latest sentence — two years for accessing police databases — on the condition that he commits no crimes for four years and pays a fine of €1,800. 🤑

• On a side note. Nicky has played his notoriety into a cameo role in Torrente, presidente, the latest installment of Santiago Segura’s series, where, we must say, he was brilliant.

And then there’s All Boivin, who is not nearly as winningly harmless. Boivin, 36, ended up in Marbella after founding the North Savage Gang in Quebec — a breakaway from the Hells Angels that was triggered, in part, by his refusal to pay the bikers their 10% cut of drug proceeds. What followed was one of Quebec’s nastiest gang wars, including kidnappings, arson, shootings, and a dude in Montreal with a finger and a toe amputated.

• On the lam. Boivin, who’d been Canada’s most wanted for three years, with a $100,000 bounty on his head, was living in Marbella in a gated community. He barely left the house while he underwent laser sessions to remove identifying tattoos — “Gucci” and “MLN” on his neck — and wore long sleeves in the summer heat.

• How was he caught? Stupid did him in. His inner circle posted their location on social media, which, you know, no cop ever uses. Oh, wait. The Policía Nacional nabbed him, and he now faces life in prison.

We never knew! Canada, it turns out, does have mobsters. And they holiday in Marbella like everyone else.

4. ⚖️ The government’s mass regularization gets a legal reprieve — for now

Spain’s left-leaning government caught a break when the country’s right-leaning Supreme Court decided — for now — not to freeze its controversial mass immigrant regularization or send it to EU courts.

• What exactly happened? The Spanish Supreme Court’s Administrative Chamber handed the government’s regularization a significant — if conditional — victory yesterday, rejecting both a suspension of the program and a referral to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU).

• Which means? The 1.17 million applicants who filed under the scheme won’t see their cases frozen — at least not yet. Which they are probably pleased to hear.

The legal challenges came from four corners. The Community of Madrid, Aragón, and Valencia — all PP-led — and Vox, who argued the regularization breached EU migration law.

• But…the rules! The specific concern, raised by three of the court’s own judges in late June, was pointed. They noted that the decree grants residency permits to people already under expulsion orders, and archives those proceedings even where courts had confirmed them — potentially clashing with EU rules requiring member states to issue return decisions against irregular migrants.

Those aren’t trivial objections. And yet the full seven-judge panel decided — unanimously, with no dissenting votes — that referring the case to the CJEU is “not pertinent at this procedural moment.”

• The logic is procedural, but it makes sense. Since the court is not suspending the decree, there’s no urgency to fast-track a European ruling. The government had argued just that — that a referral would be premature before any full examination of the merits.

This is the second time the court has rejected suspension requests. It previously turned down Vox and Madrid in May. Each refusal is good news for the government, and this one closes the most dangerous immediate door, because a freeze while EU judges deliberated could have dragged on for months.

• But, but, but… The underlying legal challenges are still very much alive. The Supreme Court must still rule on the merits of all four challenges. And the court’s own note explicitly leaves the door open to a CJEU referral later on. The regularization proceeds, but the legal battle does not end.

Maybe not as bad as feared. Considering the right-leaning Supremo has ruled twice for the left-leaning government here, maybe Spain isn’t all lawfare, all the time, like some people think?

5. ☢️ You can now add ‘radioactive barrels off Spain’s coast are falling apart’ to your long list of worries

Not to rain on your parade, but a new scientific expedition has confirmed that thousands of radioactive barrels dumped in the Atlantic Ocean off Spain’s coast are now in a worrying state of decay, which raises fresh concerns about the inevitable appearance of a Godzilla-like monster long-term environmental risks.

Wait… What?! Researchers from France’s CNRS have located and filmed some of the roughly 220,000 radioactive barrels dumped more than 40 years ago in the Atlantic trench, about 300 nautical miles from Cape Fisterra, in Galicia. Their findings: many of the containers are in an “advanced state of deterioration,” with some already leaking.

• What’s the worst that could happen? Between the late 1940s and the 1990s, several European countries (looking at you, U.K., France, etc.) used the deep Atlantic as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. The barrels, filled with radioactive materials sealed in cement, bitumen, or resin, were dropped to depths exceeding 4,000 meters.

• Exposed! The practice remained largely hidden until 1981, when a small Galician fishing boat, the Xurelo, sailed to the dumping zone and physically confronted ships discarding nuclear waste. The first images of the practice sparked international outrage, and that pressure led to a moratorium in 1983 and a full ban in 1993 under international law.

The worst has happened. The latest CNRS expedition confirms that some barrels are breaking down and releasing radionuclides into the surrounding environment. While measured radiation levels remain relatively low for now, they are higher than expected in the area. In other words, zombie fish are not here yet…but coming soon.

• If the barrels continue to degrade, radioactive substances could leak more widely, affecting local marine life and, over time, fisheries and coastal economies in northern Spain. These materials can persist in ecosystems for decades, accumulating in organisms and moving up the food chain. So… pretty bad.

What now? Should I move? Further lab analysis is underway, and pressure is mounting on the Spanish government to take a more active role.

• What’s next? Some political groups are already calling for a plan to assess whether the barrels can be safely removed, a complex and risky operation that could redefine this decades-old environmental problem. And it would not be at all expensive, right?

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That's a LOT of people

🛂 Give us your tired, your poor…ah, hell, give us everybody.

Remember Spain’s controversial massive migrant regularization program? Well, it just blew past expectations (way past!), and it’s now turning into one of the biggest social and political bets of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government.

• 1.3 million! The deadline to apply passed on Tuesday, and while the government predicted around 500,000 undocumented migrants would apply, early estimates now suggest the number could be as high as 1.3m. 😵‍💫

• The government hasn’t confirmed the final figure yet, but even its own mid-June data (900,000) already showed the scale of the surge. This would be the largest regularization in Europe in decades.

• UPDATE: After this newsletter was sent, the government confirmed a total of 1.174.978 petitions made (67% of them from Latin American citizens).

A big f*cking deal. In simple terms, the process allows undocumented migrants already in Spain to obtain legal residency and work permits (citizenship could come after years of residency).

• The government’s argument is both moral and economic. That is, these are people already working — often off the books — and bringing them into the system means taxes, contributions, and legal protections.

• Sánchez has made big claims. He has framed mass immigration as essential to sustaining the economy and says thousands of businesses, farms, and schools would disappear without migrant labor. Without immigration, he claims that Spain would lose 19% of its GDP by 2050. Now, this Big Scary Number is a guesstimate, but considering Spaniards are not having kids, he may be pointing in the right direction.

• Training. Alongside the regularization, the government has launched a €500m integration plan, focused on employment, training, housing, healthcare, and social cohesion (language programs, etc).

• Immigrants have been powering the economy recently. Since 2018, Spain has added 2.9m jobs, and some 44% of them have gone to foreign workers who help offset Spain’s aging population and labor shortages.

Party poopers. The center-right PP and far-right Vox (shocker) have come out strongly against the regularization, warning of an “efecto llamada” (a pull effect) that could encourage more irregular migration.

• The police are fueling that argument. They originally warned that the number of applicants would be much higher than the government's 500,000 estimate. Their internal estimates also suggested that up to 400,000 applicants may not have been living in Spain before the official cutoff date, raising concerns about fraud, forged documents, and a potential black market for fake proof of residency.

EU gotta be kidding me. Spain’s Supreme Court is now considering whether the policy could conflict with EU law (i.e., Schengen rules). It has asked both the government and several PP-led regions whether it should refer the case to the European Court of Justice (CJEU).

• Basically, EU citizenship. Judges are concerned that it would grant over a million people free movement across the EU and may conflict with EU migration law, especially since it was done without coordination with Brussels or other member states. Sánchez’s government, however, has said the permits are only for Spain (hmmm). And the European Commission has already signaled that migration regularization is a national power, not an EU one.

It’s not just the massive regularization that has the opposition up in arms. They’re also on fire about a massive naturalization — that of Spanish emigrants and their children abroad through a law known as the Ley de Nietos (The Grandchildren’s Law). Funny thing? Some of them used to support it.

• The Ley de Nietos is a provision of the 2022 Ley de Memoria Democrática granting Spanish citizenship to grandchildren of Civil War exiles and Franco-era emigrants. Applications closed in October 2025 with 2.45m submitted — mostly from Argentina (1.5m) and Cuba (800,000). Some 544,722 have been approved; 306,000 are now on the electoral roll.

• The awkward part. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo campaigned in Buenos Aires in 2023, promising a “specific law” to grant nationality to descendants of Spanish emigrants. In 2018, PP voted in favor of a similar Senate measure — and as Galicia’s president, Feijóo spent years defending the Galician diaspora’s right to a Spanish passport.

• Now, though. This week Feijóo called the law “electoral engineering” and accused Sánchez of “manufacturing voters.” Vox’s Abascal went further, alleging a full pucherazo (vote-rigging). Madrid presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso warned consular officials they could face legal consequences for granting citizenship to those “who don’t deserve it” — which pissed off Spain’s diplomatic corps, traditionally conservative and deeply unused to being accused of electoral fraud by the right. The government called all of it “trumpismo” — and Reuters drew the same parallel, explicitly comparing the rhetoric to Donald Trump's and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s election-denial playbooks.

The mail-in twist. Vox is now demanding that the Junta Electoral Central suspend postal voting for all Spaniards abroad — the better to protect democracy, we assume. But the irony: in the 2023 election, PP beat PSOE in overseas votes 32.7% to 24.9%. The overseas vote, as it stands, is a PP stronghold.

More news below. 👇👇

🔔 Don’t miss the latest episode of The Bubble Podcast!

Episode 2 of The Bubble Podcast is out! We talk about true crime (maybe), how to enjoy this summer’s verbenas, and mistakes foreigners make when moving to Spain.

Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🤑 Spain’s Tax Man releases the 13th annual list of biggest tax dodgers!

Just like some Spaniards get all fired up about Semana Santa, Pride, or MadCool, we anxiously await the annual release of the biggest tax debtors. Because…we’re weird, and because we just loved following Shakira’s multi-year fight with Hacienda, which she won, in part, because her hips don’t lie, usually.

• The 2025 list doesn’t disappoint. The list includes 5,853 debtors, down 2.4% from last year, and at first glance, total debt looks lower — €15.4bn, off 4.4%. But strip out duplicate entries, and it’s actually 12.2% more than last year. Well done, cheats!

• The threshold to make the list: owe more than €600,000, debt firm and uncontested as of Dec. 31, 2025.

But we’re not here for the stats; we’re here for the celebrities.

• Back after two years off, TV presenter Patricia Conde returns with €714,615 pending. ¡Bienvenida!

• Back after three years: Gossip TV regular Kiko Matamoros squeaks back in at exactly €600,740. Well done, but we’ll expect more next year!

• Going up 📈: Isabel Pantoja’s debt has grown from €1m to €1.3m. Singing more, paying less. Paz Vega (real name María Paz Campos Trigo) is up to €1.8m. And El Chatarrero — a scrap metal mogul and right-wing gossip-press regular named Luis Miguel Rodríguez — has gone from €3.7m to €4.35m. 🎇 Lol, and to think your simple autónomo debt keeps you up at night.

• Going down (slowly) 📉: Bertín Osborne, the singer, right-wing(ish) TV star and…9th Count of Donadío de Casasola, still owes €835,000, though at least it’s trending the right way — notable given he just launched a new telecom company with the slogan “things done right, things done correctly”. Mario Conde, the former banker-turned-politician, has brought his tab from €6.4m in 2023 down to €1.9m. Points for effort.

• Leaving: Diego Torres, of the Nóos corruption case (remember the one involving the King’s brother-in-law?), has made it off. ¡Chao! 👋

• The corporate heavyweights: Real people are fun, but the serious money is corporate. Reyal Urbis, a real estate firm, has led the list every year since 2015 and owes €264.9m. Behind them: a parade of oil companies under investigation for VAT fraud — Bio-Zenite Energy (€232.9m), Metaway Combustibles (€195.6m), Vertix Petroleum (€194.7m).

The list was created in 2015 as a financial shaming mechanism. Does it work? Somewhat: €79.5m was paid right before the Dec. 31 deadline, presumably to avoid appearing. The problem is that 20% of the total debt (€4.3bn) belongs to companies in bankruptcy proceedings — meaning it may never actually be collected.

• Dream on. Someday, we hope to have enough 🫰to be that far in tax debt.

2. 🏳️‍🌈 Parliament criminalizes “conversion therapy”, at last

Just in time for Pride Week. Parliament has approved a reform of the Penal Code to criminalize the so-called “conversion therapies,” practices aimed at changing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

• UN says torture. These "therapies,” which the UN calls a form of torture, range from psychological pressure to coercive religious “treatments,” often targeting vulnerable people, including minors.

• Banned already. Until now, these practices — which have persisted — were technically banned in Spain, though only punishable with administrative fines.

• Little punishment. There was little punishment under the previous regime: out of 23 complaints filed with the Ministry of Equality in recent years, 20 were shelved. And No Es Terapia (It’s Not Therapy), an NGO that fights against the practices, blames regions led by the PP and Vox for ignoring complaints brought to them.

The new law changes that. It introduces prison sentences of six months to two years, even if the person undergoing the “therapy” claims to consent. MPs supporting the reform argue that consent in these cases often comes from pressure, fear, or family coercion.

• For this reason, the law goes a step further. Parents, guardians, or anyone facilitating these practices on minors or vulnerable individuals can also face criminal penalties, including the loss of custody rights.

• The measure passed with broad support from the left and government allies (PSOE, Sumar, Podemos, ERC, Bildu, PNV and others), who framed it as a long-overdue protection of dignity and human rights. Socialist MP Víctor Gutiérrez, who is gay, said that “these are not therapies; they are torture,” arguing that fines were clearly not enough to stop them.

The right was… the right. Meaning it was split. The center-right PP abstained despite saying it supports banning conversion therapies, arguing the law is “legally flawed” and too vague, particularly around the issue of consent.

• Big market for that? Some within the party pushed to allow adults to voluntarily seek such treatments (hmm), a position that triggered a heated clash in parliament.

• Far-right Vox went further, clutching its pearls and voting against the law entirely, calling it an attack on “individual freedom” and denying the scale of the problem. They also said this law “bans homosexuals from seeing a psychologist” (which is a lie).

The left was also being the left. Despite backing the law, several left-wing parties said it doesn’t go far enough. Their main complaint? It focuses on punishing perpetrators but does little to help victims rebuild their lives.

• Proposals for financial aid, housing support, and psychological assistance were left out — leaving what some called a “half-finished” reform.

More fun things. Now Spain can turn from fighting over conversion therapy, just in time for Pride.

3. 💬 RTVE apologizes for decision to subtitle a woman from… Sevilla (?!)

Andalusians speak fast and have something against the letter 'S', but come on, now. Spain’s public broadcaster, RTVE, found itself at the center of a shit storm an unlikely culture war after it subtitled the Andalusian accent of the mother of Spanish footballer Fabián Ruiz in a World Cup documentary.

• That changed quickly. What was meant to be an emotional interview quickly sparked accusations of “andalufobia” (anti-Andalusian prejudice) and restarted a long-running debate in this country over regional accents and class stereotypes.

Selective subtitling. The controversy began in Denominación de origen, a documentary series about the families and hometowns of Spain’s World Cup squad.

• Not like mother like son. When Ruiz's mother, Chari Peña, spoke about her son’s childhood from their home in Los Palacios, in Sevilla, RTVE displayed Spanish subtitles because of her strong Andalusian accent. (Curiously, they did not subtitle Ruiz himself, even though they both speak with the same accent.)

Cue Andalusian scorn. This triggered an immediate backlash on TV and social media, with thousands accusing RTVE of treating Andalusian Spanish as if it were a foreign language and reinforcing an old stereotype portraying Andalusians as less educated.

• Fine, whatevs. Ruiz himself responded with sarcasm during an interview with DAZN: “If someone doesn’t understand me, you can put subtitles on my Andalusian accent too.”

The backlash was so intense that RTVE President José Pablo López publicly apologized, calling the decision “a huge mistake.”

• And I prostrate myself before you. Speaking to a parliamentary committee, López offered an “unreserved apology” to all Andalusians—and especially to Chari Peña—saying that “the Andalusian accent is a treasure and part of our cultural heritage, and should never be treated as a language barrier requiring translation.”

• Changes to come. He also said RTVE is reviewing its internal procedures to ensure the incident is not repeated, etc. etc.

Spain is home to a wide variety of languages, dialects, and accents, from Catalan to Basque and everything in between. That's what makes Spain so culturally rich (well, that and the different kinds of tapas).

• Hint: If you’re not a native Spanish speaker and need help understanding people from Andalucía, spend more time with them. It helps. 😉

4. 🌞 Did Spain install too much solar energy?

This is not a screed against green energy! We just felt the need to say that after that headline because, you know, people might think we’d gone all Orange Menace about the energy transition. But this story is about something not totally positive that is happening amidst the (necessary) transition: an economic washout that could slow it down.

• Please, take my power! The issue is that Spain has already broken its annual record for negative-price electricity hours — meaning times when producers must pay users to take their power — with half the year still to go, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in a piece out this week. The culprit is a renewables boom so successful it’s undermining itself.

More than $80 billion has poured into Spanish renewables over the last 15 years — a transition we’ve cheered before. Last year, solar overtook wind as Spain’s largest electricity source. But the grid’s ability to actually absorb, store, and distribute all that power hasn’t kept pace with the capacity to generate it. During peak hours, there’s simply too much electricity and nowhere for it to go. (Hmmm, installing batteries might be a good idea. No?)

• Investors are trying to exit the markets by selling at steep discounts, says Daniel Pérez of L’Energètica, a Catalan utility. At least four Spanish solar companies or projects have been put on the market, including Arena Green Power and Matrix Renewables.

• More examples. Iberdrola, Europe’s biggest green power producer, has delayed asset sales after getting lowball offers. BlackRock and four other major firms have opened short positions in solar company Solaria — whose output jumped 50% in Q1 but whose average sale price fell 20%.

Remember that April 2025 apagón? The blackout, which plunged most of Spain and Portugal into darkness, made things worse. Since then, the state grid operator Red Eléctrica has been more aggressive about ordering solar farms offline — partly because solar panels, unlike old-school spinning turbines, don’t naturally stabilize the grid’s frequency and voltage, and that can contribute to…blackouts.

• Of course, we’re not complaining. Spain’s power prices are among Europe’s lowest — like, roughly half what Germans pay. The government calls the situation “transitional” and is planning €30bn in grid upgrades through 2030, while also thinking about giving direct financial support to struggling producers — as well as incentives for batteries.

Like always in bad times, the vultures are circling. “Distressed asset investors” may spend €6-10 billion to snap up struggling assets, Luis del Barrio of Arthur D. Little told Bloomberg. And another €10bn could go into installing batteries (good idea!).

• Tomorrow, promise. Rafael Alcón at solar contractor Lantania, says clients are paying late as their projects underperform. But he claims to be cool about it: “It’s better to get paid late than never.”

5. ⚓ Archaeologists in Mallorca brought an entire sunken Roman ship to land

The ship has risen! Long live the ship! Fine, that’s ridiculous. But we’re excited. For the first time ever in Spain, archaeologists have recovered a complete Roman shipwreck. On Monday, as sunburned tourists were eating piles of ice cream along the seafront at Can Pastilla (one of the busiest tourist traps beaches in Mallorca), meters offshore, the archaeologists were finishing the recovery of the Ses Fontanelles, one of the most important underwater finds in the Mediterranean.

• It took four months, 15 researchers, and a team of Spanish Navy divers. Working in water barely two meters deep, the Arqueomallornauta team dismantled the vessel plank by plank, casting each piece in custom fiberglass molds that hardened underwater to preserve the wood’s exact shape.

• The final act — floating the last two hull sections along the seabed to the port and hoisting them out by crane — completed a campaign that the lead archaeologist Darío Bernal described as “technically complicated” but, he added, “we are very happy.”

The backstory. Dating to the 4th century AD, the Ses Fontanelles wreck is of a 12-meter merchant vessel loaded with more than 300 amphorae of fish sauce, olive oil, and wine from around Cartagena, almost certainly heading for Rome for some serious noshing.

• The end. A storm caught it in the Bay of Palma and sent it to the bottom, where it lay sealed under sand for 1,700 years until another storm exposed it in 2019 and a diver spotted amphora necks poking through the seabed — 65 meters from a beach where over a million tourists swim every summer.

What they found. The finds are extraordinary even by Mediterranean standards. Most of the amphorae survived with sealed stoppers and contents intact (taste test soon?). Painted inscriptions on the jars — tituli picti — name two merchants (Alumnio and Ausonio), identify seven scribes, and include a tax reference, making Ses Fontanelles the Roman wreck with the most painted inscriptions in the entire Med.

• The headline find may be a large section of the actual sail — one of only two such pieces anywhere, the other being Egypt’s ancient port of Berenice. Also recovered were four anchors, two intact baskets, and the first steering oar tiller ever found in Spain. A coin minted in Siscia (modern Sisak, Croatia) in 320 AD and placed in the mast socket during the ship’s original launching ritual confirmed the date.

What’s next. The wreck will spend at least a year undergoing preservation work at Palma’s Castle of San Carlos before moving to the National Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Cartagena (Murcia). The long-term plan is a permanent home near the Roman site of Pollentia in Alcudia, Mallorca.

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It’s getting hot in here

💥 “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, Sánchez edition

No, it’s not because of the heat wave. Right now, everything is hitting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at once. This week has delivered a brutal one-two-three punch: his former right-hand man, José Luis Ábalos, was sentenced to over 24 years in prison, his ex-adviser Koldo García to nearly 20, and his wife, Begoña Gómez, is now officially heading to trial in a separate case.

Legal Earthquake #1. On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the so-called Caso Koldo (which we’ve covered many times here). Ábalos, who was once one of the most powerful figures in Sánchez’s PSOE and a key architect of his rise to power, was found guilty of running a corruption scheme tied to pandemic-era mask contracts (and got the longest prison sentence ever for a former minister — congrats!).

• Bad men #1 + #2. The court found he participated in an organized operation involving kickbacks, influence-peddling, and steering public contracts allegedly steered toward friendly companies. His close aide, Koldo García, was also convicted as part of the same network.

• Snitching Cooperating pays. Then there’s Víctor de Aldama, the businessman at the center of the scheme, who was convicted too, but won’t go to prison because he cooperated with the authorities. The court explicitly rewarded his testimony and evidence, arguing that collaboration helps dismantle corruption networks.

• The audacity! Inside the government, that decision has triggered real unease. Not because of Aldama himself (who made threats against Sánchez, suggesting he was involved), but because of what it signaled (at least to them): tell the truth, and you will receive leniency testify against the socialist party, and you walk.

Legal Earthquake #2. Just when things couldn’t get more complicated politically, another crisis hit Sánchez’s personal orbit. That is, Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has formally opened trial proceedings against his wife, Begoña Gómez, accusing her of leveraging her position as the prime minister’s wife to boost her professional projects and influence business relationships.

• The charges range from influence peddling to corruption in business dealings — serious accusations that Gómez has denied. The Madrid public prosecutor has questioned the solidity of the case, but Peinado is like a dog with a bone and is pressing ahead nonetheless.

Red flags. What has really set off alarm bells, though, is how the judge is handling it. In a WTF moment highly controversial move, he ordered Gómez to surrender her passport and banned her from leaving Spain, citing a potential flight risk.

• Questioning the Thin Blue Line. Peinado suggested that the very police officers assigned to protect her could help her escape (which pissed off pretty much everyone). The National Police and police unions, which are not exactly known for siding with this government, called it outrageous. And the judicial watchdog, the CGPJ, voted in favor of opening a disciplinary investigation into the judge over those statements. (Still, Gómez turned in her passport yesterday).

Out to get her? This case itself has been controversial from day one. It originated from what many saw as a flimsy complaint filed by Manos Limpias, a pseudo-union linked to the far right, and has been marked by a series of once again, WTF eyebrow-raising moments.

No comment. Sánchez’s response has been a combination of trolling and exhaustion. Just hours after the Supreme Court’s bombshell ruling on Koldo, he posted a TikTok advising people to drink water and wear sunscreen during the heatwave.

• The best defense is a good offense. Yesterday in Parliament, he switched to full mixed metaphor combat mode, condemning corruption, defending his record, and aggressively going after the opposition, especially the PP. Corruption exists, he says, but not in his government as a system (a distinction that may be too cute by half), and certainly not on the scale seen in previous administrations (which sounds like he admits it exists, but anyway…).

• The opposition laughed at his response, with PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo asking him to call an election. Even former Socialist PM Felipe González said he should either resign or call early elections out of “political responsibility.”

What happens now? We’re headed for a summer break (yay!). Begoña Gómez is on track to stand trial unless a higher court intervenes, and the broader corruption investigations linked to the Caso Koldo are still unfolding, meaning more revelations could be coming.

• Sánchez insists he will stay the course until 2027 (though his comments suggest he’s rebating that from July to March). But after a week like this, that timeline suddenly looks far less certain.

More news below. 👇👇

🔔 But first… Don’t miss the latest episode of The Bubble Podcast!

We discuss PM Zapatero’s corruption accusations, the very complicated relationship between the US and Spanish governments, and the World Cup. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🇺🇸💔🇪🇸 Are American businesses souring on Spain as Sánchez and Trump duke it out?

Economic reverb. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s stand against President Trump’s war in Iran, tech bro assholishness, and Israeli military attacks are either a principled stand against the 🍊 Menace’s policies or the political grandstanding of a leader unloved at home (or both; it can be both). But it could be hitting Spain where it really hurts — you know, el bolsillo 🤑.

• What’s the deal? American companies are pulling money out of Spain at a historic pace. Between January and March 2026 — the first quarter to fully capture the diplomatic faceoff between Madrid and Washington — U.S. disinvestment sextupled (not often you get to use that word!), rising 534% year-over-year to €3.3 billion.

• Long time high. That’s the largest quarterly disinvestment spike going back to when records began in 1993. Net U.S. investment cratered 719%, flipping from slightly positive a year ago to negative €1.97 billion. In one quarter, ‘merica went from Spain’s #1 foreign investor to #254.

The timing is a bit obvs. Sánchez came out hard in March against the U.S. and Israel’s quest to send Iran back to the Stone Age, including by blocking America from using the joint bases in Spain for the war. Trump responded by calling Spain “a terrible partner.” That’s the last month the new data covers, which matters because American investment had been booming until then: 2025 closed with record U.S. investment, up 53% to €10.2bn.

• The U.S. numbers are the worst, but they’re not alone. Overall, foreign net investment in Spain fell 16.8% in Q1 2026, with total foreign disinvestment up 84.8%.

• But why? The fracas with the Orange Menace compounds pre-existing conditions, like Spain’s complex regulations and energy grid problems (remember the apagón?). It’s also worth noting that Spain’s so-called escudo antiopas — a screening system meant to stop foreigners from getting their grubby paws on buying strategic Spanish companies — again directed about 40% of its 2025 reviews at U.S. investors (it’s been consistent since the escudo launched in 2020).

• Two sectors seem to be taking the worst of it. Data centers, where Spain was competing with France for Mediterranean leadership (France: 320 active centers; Spain: 145), and defense, where industry sources say flatly that “most bridges are broken.”

What’s next? Economists are watching closely whether Q1 was a one-off — a handful of major exits skewing the data — or the start of a real shift. In part to avoid drama, some regional governments — chiefly Aragón (33% of Spain’s data center projects) and Madrid — are going to court U.S. investors directly and leave the 🍊 fella and Mr. Handsome to fight things out on their own time.

2. 🏺 Archaeologists prove Extremadura was super de lujo back in the day

You may think Extremadura is just the hot place that Spain’s conquistadores would do anything to get away from, including going to the New World to die (or kill). But no — back in ancient times, that could barely afford the written word, it was like Las Vegas and Dubai all wrapped into one.

• How do we know this? Archaeologists at Casas del Turuñuelo, a Tartessian site (long story) in Guareña (Badajoz), have just wrapped their eighth dig season with another mind-blowing find: half of a bronze ritual cart from around 500 BC, decorated with griffins, a river god with his tongue out, and two bearded Atlas figures holding the whole thing up.

• Really, this is crazy unique. Esther Rodríguez and Sebastián Celestino, the CSIC co-directors behind the dig, say they’ve “searched by land, sea and air” and found nothing like it. The only partial parallels are Etruscan.

Turuñuelo has been delivering for years. Previous campaigns at the mound turned up the first Tartessian stone sculptures ever found (five near-life-size busts); a slate tablet with one of the oldest known paleohispanic alphabets carved around a scene of battling warriors; and the bones of 42 horses and assorted livestock, arranged with eerie ceremonial precision — the first documented animal sacrifice on the scale described in the Iliad and the Old Testament.

• What else is hiding under the mound? A two-story monumental building from 2,500 years ago, unique in the protohistoric southwest Iberian Peninsula.

What it all means. Rodríguez is calling this “the year of imports.” Why? The cart is probably Etruscan. Found alongside it were attic ceramics from Greece, an Egyptian alabaster perfume flask, ivory fragments carved with warriors, lions, and lotus flowers, and a Greek ritual foot-washing basin that the team believes “traveled in a package” with a marble altar column found last year.

• Someone at Turuñuelo knew what the objects were for. The striking thing, Celestino says, is that these Mediterranean luxury goods keep turning up in landlocked Badajoz but not at coastal sites like Cádiz or Málaga. That’s just another reason Extremadura intrigues us — that and how much good seafood you can eat in the desert zone.

What’s next? The other half of the bronze cart is presumably still somewhere under the mound, with half the site still unexcavated. Spain’s largest protective dome is being built over the site. Isotope analysis will try to pinpoint where the bronze came from.

• And then there’s the central mystery. Why did Tartessian Extremadura’s inhabitants destroy everything, bury it in a mound, and walk away 2,500 years ago?

3. 🛩️ And then the princess flew a plane…

You know we’re always up for heartwarming royal news about Princess Leonor. Just three weeks ago, we breathlessly recounted how Felipe VI’s eldest daughter had jumped out of a plane more than once as part of her military parachuting training. At the time, we speculated that Spain was all there for Leonor because watching her grow from teen to adult was a welcome break from political scandals and weird stories about corpses that dominate our news.

• Now she’s done even more! Not only can she jump out of planes — she can fly one alongside her dad!

What happened: On June 19, the 12th anniversary of Felipe VI’s proclamation as king, the Royal House released 18 photographs of father and daughter doing some serious father-daughter bonding — by flying together.

• Kinda like when your dad did bumper cars with you. Leonor, in her third and final year of military training at the Air and Space Academy in San Javier (Murcia), flew a Pilatus PC-21 trainer aircraft as her father flew one alongside her, and together they soared over La Manga del Mar Menor on the Murcian coast. Like cute chickadee nestlings taking their first flight.

• The king was told what's what by the princess. Before takeoff, Leonor presented the mission briefing to Felipe, explaining the technical details and safety procedures. To her father. Who is the king. This is either excellent parenting or a slightly overachieving daughter. We’re guessing both.

• A note on the landing. “I felt better than I expected,” Felipe said, stepping off the plane (suggesting…?). Leonor hugged him and said: “Thank you, Papa.” The Academy director, watching them land, said it “went quite well.” High, if understated, praise all around.

The 12-year milestone. The timing wasn’t accidental. When Felipe VI was proclaimed king in June 2014, he promised a “renewed monarchy for a new era.” Twelve years later, watching his daughter brief him on flight safety before climbing into a combat trainer and flying formation over the Mediterranean — well, that image is doing a lot of monarchy renewal work.

• What’s next? Leonor’s military training wraps in July, when she receives her commissions as Lieutenant in the Army, Lieutenant in the Air Force, and Ensign in the Navy, in three separate ceremonies alongside her classmates. After three years of sailing tall ships, jumping from planes, and flying combat trainers, she returns to royal duties full-time. With a CV that puts most 21-year-olds (like, um, the younger versions of us?) to shame.

4. 🏳️‍🌈 Gay-jà vu: People are mad (again) at Madrid’s Pride banners

Oh, boy. It’s that time of year again. Madrid Pride is back to take over the city, and so is the annual controversy surrounding the City Council’s campaign. Earlier this week, PP Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida’s government unveiled the official posters for MADO Madrid Orgullo 2026 — and people are, once again, pissed off not happy.

• Rings a bell? Remember back in 2024 when people hated the banners because they appeared to reduce Madrid Pride to sex and alcohol? Well, this year’s campaign is swapping people for… random objects. But hey, at least they are rainbow-colored castizo objects!

• No, seriously. Instead of faces, bodies, or community imagery, the posters feature AI-generated scenes of ultra-Madrid staples: a flower-filled balcony, stacked terrace chairs, jars of candy.

• All wrapped in rainbow colors and stamped with slogans like “Proudly from Madrid” and, later, the updated line: “Diversity is lived in Madrid”. (You can see them here.)

Over the rainbow. The idea, according to the City Council, is to show how diversity is “integrated into everyday life” across neighborhoods, homes, and businesses. The problem? For a lot of people, that’s exactly the issue.

• Opposition leaders on the left said the campaign erased the people Pride is meant to celebrate. PSOE’s spokesperson in the city, Reyes Maroto, accused Mayor Almeida of turning Pride into a “marketing campaign” that reduces the community to decoration, while Más Madrid’s Rita Maestre slammed the initiative as disconnected from the movement’s history.

• LGBTQ+ organizations went further. Arcópoli, a major Madrid LGBTQ+ rights group, accused the city of a “systematic erasure” of LGBTQ+ people.

• The city responds. José Fernández, Madrid’s Social Policies chief, said LGBT diversity “isn’t a slogan here and that diversity isn’t just visible during Pride, but present year-round in the small, everyday details of the city.”

A gay old time. Madrid Pride Week kicks off today and runs until July 5. Last year’s edition attracted between 1.5 and 2 million visitors and generated close to €900m, making it the biggest Pride celebration in all of Europe. Even though there’s still work to do, Spain is killing it.

• Demand is already surging. Accommodation searches are up 70% over last year. So, whatever you think of the posters, Pride in Madrid is still a massive deal.

5. 😔 A rash of drownings put Spain’s beaches under scrutiny

This is a sad one. A series of tragic drownings over the past few days has shaken Spain just as the summer season begins. The most devastating incident took place in Tarragona, where three children — aged 12 and 13 — lost their lives, while two more adults died in separate incidents along the Alicante coast.

• In Tarragona, six kids were swimming near a rocky area known as Cova del Gos, when strong currents and waves pulled them out to sea. (A yellow (caution) flag was flying at the time because of rip currents and undertow.) Three made it back to shore and alerted lifeguards, but the others became trapped against the rocks, unable to fight the current or find a way out.

Rescue was very difficult. Rough sea conditions forced lifeguards to improvise; at one point, they had to abandon a boat rescue and swim out themselves. One of the children died at the scene despite multiple attempts at resuscitation.

• The other two were stabilized and rushed to the hospital (one by helicopter), but both later died from their injuries. City officials declared several days of mourning.

In Alicante, too. There, two more people died.

• One man was found unconscious in a rocky cove in Torrevieja with no lifeguard service present; despite CPR efforts, he could not be revived.

• Later that same day, a 24-year-old man drowned at Mil Palmeras beach shortly after lifeguards had ended their shift. Conditions had been rough all day, with warnings issued and a yellow flag raised.

These incidents highlight a critical issue as Spain heads into peak beach season — knowing where and when to swim can be a matter of life and death.

• Rocky areas, strong currents, and unsupervised beaches dramatically increase risk — even for young, healthy swimmers.

• Summer seasons. With more people heading to the water as rough seas affect parts of the coast, authorities are again urging caution. Basic rules: check the flags, avoid dangerous zones, and never underestimate the sea.

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Who, me?

👨🏻‍⚖️ Former PM Zapatero heads to court and swears he’s like totally innocent

Another week, another political first. For the first time since the return of democracy, a former prime minister testified in court as a suspect this week.

• Yup, it was ZP. Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who was in office from 2004 to 2011, spent nearly three hours at the National Court yesterday morning, denying any wrongdoing in a sprawling corruption and money laundering probe linked to the controversial €53m government rescue of airline Plus Ultra during the pandemic.

• It’s the beginning of a major scandal that exploded recently, that has the center-left PSOE party freaking out and spiraling asking for “patience”, and that has put Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in the extremely tricky spot of having to defend his number one supporter.

Hold on. How did we get here? Investigators suspect Zapatero may have used his influence with the Spanish government to push the bailout through and benefit companies linked to businessman Julio Martínez, in exchange for commissions allegedly paid through sham consultancy arrangements.

• The 1%. At the center of the case is an alleged 1% cut of the Plus Ultra bailout that may have been funneled to Zapatero and cohorts (including his daughters) through a network of companies, possibly including an offshore structure in Dubai. Oh, and investigators think some of the bailout money was used to launder funds skimmed from Venezuelan government programs by businessmen tied to Nicolás Maduro’s government. Nice!

• Who among us does not have an emerald necklace? On top of this, police found jewels worth €1.3m in a safe in Zapatero's Madrid office, a discovery that added new charges, including tax fraud and smuggling, and intensified scrutiny.

I am not a crook. In court, Zapatero stuck to a clear line. That is, he had “no involvement whatsoever” in the Plus Ultra bailout and no contact with officials to influence it. He insisted his work was legitimate consulting based on his experience as a former PM

• Just guys paying each other on a handshake deal. Zapatero acknowledged knowing Martínez since 2011 and working with him from 2020 under what he described as a verbal consultancy agreement, paid annually.

• What, me? But he rejected the idea that the company involved was a shell used to channel illicit payments. He also denied ever owning or creating companies abroad and said he knew nothing about any commission agreement tied to the bailout. (The judge, for one, had doubts, saying, “He has failed to refute the rational indications of criminality”).

The jewel of denial. The issue of the jewels remains unresolved — and kinda awkward. Zapatero attempted to delay answering questions about them earlier this week, arguing he needed more time to document their origin. The judge refused, saying they were not new facts.

• So he didn't say anything. Zapatero chose not to answer on that point and will return to court in the coming days to address it specifically. It’s one of the most sensitive parts of the case, and potentially the most damaging from an optics standpoint.

No flight risk. Despite the seriousness of the accusations, the judge rejected the prosecutor’s request to seize Zapatero’s passport and impose travel restrictions.

• The reason? His public profile and “deep roots” in Spain make him an unlikely fugitive, and most key evidence has already been secured. There are suspicions, sure, but not enough, for now, to justify limiting his freedom. Plus, why would he leave? It's summer in Spain!

Really, I meant it! Zapatero released a short statement after leaving court, repeating he is “completely innocent” of all charges and will prove it, “however long it takes.”

• 🐌 Considering the speed of Spanish courts, that could take a while.

More news below. 👇👇

🔔 But first… Don’t miss the first episode of The Bubble Podcast!

We discuss PM Zapatero’s corruption accusations, the very complicated relationship between the US and Spanish governments, and the World Cup. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🧑‍🔧 ¿Cómo se dice Watergate en español?

Spain is one big anti-corruption report these days. Spain’s elite anti-corruption unit, the UCO, dropped its zillionth special investigative report this week — and it’s gonna leave a mark.

• Documents. Basement. This should ring a bell. Among documents seized from former PSOE bigwig Santos Cerdán’s locked devices in the basement of the party’s headquarters, investigators claim to have found evidence that the PSOE’s former organization secretary had authorized — and been fully briefed on — a coordinated operation to torpedo judicial cases threatening the Sánchez government.

• But Cerdán was not alone. At the center of everything was a woman named Leire Díez, whose nickname, la fontanera de Ferraz (the plumber of the PSOE HQ on Madrid’s Calle Ferraz), turns out to be entirely apt. She was there to fix leaks.

So who the hell is Leire Díez? And why is the government so scared of her?

• Small town to secret agent. Diez started as a politician in the Cantabrian mountain town of Vega de Pas (where the former mayor called her “very manipulative”), before working her way through PSOE communications roles and up to the post of director of philately at the national postal museum. Her LinkedIn page stops there, but somewhere along the way, she allegedly became the operational core of a scheme to kneecap judges, prosecutors, and the UCO itself. The party, it now emerges, paid her €45,000 between 2015 and 2017.

Great travel perks. According to the UCO, her activities were overseen by Cerdán, who ordered PSOE staff to approve any trip she requested, no questions asked. The alleged scheme was to find people who were willing to hand over compromising information on judges and prosecutors unfriendly to PSOE interests, sometimes in exchange for help with their legal cases.

• A document titled “Incumplimientos” (Failures) — found both on her laptop and on Cerdán’s Ferraz devices — allegedly catalogued the whole operation, strongly suggesting that somebody in PSOE leadership knew.

• Travel agent. A WhatsApp group the conspirators named “Vacaciones y Viajes” (Holidays and Travel) — yes, really — allegedly coordinated efforts to derail the case against the PM’s brother in Badajoz.

When we say “strongly suggesting”... Díez reportedly told one contact that when “your wife and your brother are charged, you realize you have to clean things up” — language uncomfortably close to describing Pedro Sánchez’s own situation.

• The initials “P.S.” also appear in her notebooks next to notes about arranging a lawyer for David Sánchez. (We are sure this is a total coincidence. It could mean Paquita Salas.)

• Totally not a threat. “I know much more than what appears in the notebooks,” she has said. “I’m worth more for what I keep quiet.”

This week’s report also deepened suspicions about Mercedes González — the government-appointed head of the Guardia Civil — who met Díez multiple times, then opened three internal investigations into UCO agents in nine months. She appeared before the Senate this Tuesday, where she repeatedly denied influencing the investigations.

• We definitely wouldn’t be worried if we were in government. Not at all. /sarcasm

2. 🛃 That whole “free residency” thing got a few more applicants than expected

500,000. That’s the number of undocumented immigrants in Spain the Sánchez government repeatedly estimated would apply for the massive one-off regularization it approved in April. The think tank Funcas pegged it at 840,000, while others went as high as 1m, but Immigration Minister Elma Saiz stuck with 500,000.

• It appears the government was wrong. With two weeks still to go before the June 30 deadline, over 900,000 people have applied — almost double the government’s public estimate, and a record that blows past the previous high of 691,655 applications set in 2005 (576,506 were accepted then).

• It could hit one million by the time the window closes. Of those, around 359,000 have been formally admitted to the process — meaning those applicants now hold provisional residency and work permits while their cases are reviewed.

Why so many? The requirements were more flexible than previous regularizations — no pre-work contract required — and the ministry actively encouraged people to apply even with incomplete documentation.

• Shhhhh… Also: there were simply far more undocumented people in Spain than the government was willing to say out loud. Spain’s police said they had estimated figures much closer to reality, but their projections were “questioned and minimized” by the government. And most of these applicants, by the way, didn’t arrive on inflatable dinghies — they flew in as tourists, mostly from Latin America, and stayed.

The right is predictably furious. Vox has challenged the decree at the Supreme Court — which refused to suspend it in May but still has to rule on its legality — and the PP, which initially didn’t block the process, has since fully embraced scary tales of an immigrant flood.

• The government, for its part, is “cautious and optimistic,” noting the numbers need filtering for duplicates and pointing out that each valid application generates an estimated €4,000 in net fiscal benefit to the state.

The administration has three months to process each application. Given the volume, this is going to be quite a hot bureaucratic summer.

3. 🗣️ FIFA realizes that lots of people actually speak Spanish (and Spain loses a few times)

FIFA caused a big ol’ escándalo scandal at the World Cup when they outlawed the use of Spanish at press conferences unless one of the teams there was from a Spanish-speaking country. Which seems odd, considering that the World Cup is being hosted by (checks notes) the U.S., Canada, and…Mexico.

• They might as well have just screamed “Nein!” FIFA officials at World Cup press conferences repeatedly told journalists from Spanish-language media that they couldn’t ask questions of Spanish-speaking players in Spanish.

• Seriously? Wanna use Spanish to ask the Dutch player Frenkie de Jong, who’s played for years at FC Barça, what it’s like to be a team leader? How about posing a question to Vinicius Jr., who plays at Real Madrid? Nope, and nope.

• “It’s for the translation.” That was the excuse the FIFA official rolled out when he told a Mexican media reporter he could only use English, Dutch, or Japanese to talk to De Jong.

The incident that lit the fuse. Rodrigo Ornelas, a journalist from Mexico’s TV Azteca, tried to ask Morocco player Achraf Hakimi — who was born and grew up in Madrid — a question in Spanish before the Brazil-Morocco match in New Jersey.

• A FIFA official cut him off. Hakimi offered to just answer in Spanish anyway. The official said no. Video of the exchange went viral across Spain and Latin America (see above).

FIFA quietly reversed course shortly after — with no official statement, because humility — adding Spanish translation to all U.S. matches and instructing officials to allow questions in Spanish going forward.

• Context that perhaps should have been obvious from the start. Again, Mexico is a host nation, and 57 million people speak Spanish in the U.S., making it the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking country. Behind only Mexico.

But what about the Canadians? No word yet on whether reporters will be allowed to end their questions with “Eh?” in the country that gave us Neil Young and Justin Bieber (moving on…).

• In other sad Spanish sports news. The Georgian-Spanish mixed martial arts superstar Ilia Topuria got his ass kicked lost for the first time, quitting after the fourth round with two broken orbital bones at the 🍊 Menace’s cage match 80th birthday party in the White House construction site.

• And Spain’s national soccer fútbol team got its ass kicked tied its first World Cup game 0-0 against Cabo Verde, a country making its first appearance at the competition and that many of you thought was in Latin America. Whoops!

4. 🫠 Madrid classrooms are turning into saunas, and we’re not sure who’s in charge

Sweat n’ wild. Madrid is once again facing a very apocalypse 2026 problem: classrooms that are just too damn hot for learning (or even screwing around). With temperatures climbing well above 30°C, and in some cases hitting 35-37°C, students and teachers are dying struggling to get through the day.

• En plein air. Lessons are being moved to hallways, gardens, or anywhere with a hint of shade. Others are improvising survival tactics: water sprays, fans, even literal “manguerazos” (using a hose to get wet like it’s 1920) during breaks.

Sorry, kids, not our problem. Here’s the core problem: no one fully agrees on who is responsible. The center-right regional government (led by PP’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso) handles major infrastructure, while the City Council (PP’s José Luis Martínez-Almeida) is responsible for smaller interventions. And the center-left federal government provides funding. The result? A lot of finger-pointing and very little urgency.

• Dude, we're trying. Madrid’s regional government insisted it's invested millions in A/C (€17.8m this year, €80m since 2019) and pointed to the need for more federal money.

• Ha ha. At the Madrid assembly, Ayuso’s culture advisor even mocked argued that heat could be “a source of inspiration”, which we're sure is what sweating students and teachers were feeling: Inspiration to kick someone in the teeth.

• Who's laughing now? The leftist opposition party Más Madrid blamed the politicians they want to replace and suggested holding parliamentary sessions without air conditioning, just to see how politicians like it (we're gonna guess that prolly won’t happen but not a bad initiative, to be honest).

No one’s buying it. Unions and parents' associations have reported the situation to labor inspectors, saying the high temperatures are not only annoying but unsafe.

• There have already been cases of dizziness, headaches, and even fainting. One study found that temperatures above 27°C directly reduce attention, memory, and learning capacity. Note to self: Maybe our schools were designed for a climate that no longer exists?

• Repeat after us: It's almost vacation. Teachers are improvising, and some classes are being held in corridors or outdoors. In extreme cases, schools are starting to feel less like places of learning and more like The Hunger Games.

Into the frying pan. On top of all this, Spain is heading into what could be the first major heatwave of the summer, with temperatures expected to jump 5 to 10 degrees above normal — and potentially exceed 40°C in some areas.

• Brace yourselves, it’s about to get hawt.

5. 🤩 Javier Bardem left his print, and Hollywood just got a little more Spanish

First time for everything. We may suck at sports this week, but when it comes to the soft power of Spanish film talent, we’re feeling damn proud. Legendary actor Javier Bardem has officially joined cinema immortality, leaving his handprints and footprints at the iconic TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard — becoming the first Spanish actor ever to do so.

• Among friends. He joins legends like Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson, and a who’s who of film history. Like Vin Diesel.

Why him? Honestly, why not him? Bardem is one of the few Spanish performers who has managed to crack Hollywood without losing his identity (speaking English helps). Not only that, but damn, have you seen him perform (and his fabulous nose)?

• Hollywood longevity. From Jamón, jamón and Mar adentro to No Country for Old Men (which earned him an Oscar) and global blockbusters like James Bond’s Skyfall, Bardem has spent three decades doing what Denis Villeneuve described perfectly as transforming himself into whoever the story needs.

True to himself. Bardem played it exactly how you’d expect. He cracked jokes, he kissed the cement, he barked, and he thanked his late mother, Pilar Bardem, for grounding him in the idea that success (and failure) are both illusions.

• Aww… He also thanked his “wonderful” wife Penelope Cruz and his children.

Friends in high places. Around him were heavyweights like Villeneuve and Michael Mann, praising his talent and his integrity — something that matters more than ever right now.

• Keeping the Hollywood left alive. While Tinseltown has gotten quieter under the current U.S. administration, Bardem has been loud and clear on issues like Gaza and openly critical of the 🍊 Menace and U.S. immigration policies — even referencing ICE during the ceremony.

Can’t stop, won’t stop. Bardem is not slowing down. He’s currently starring in a new Apple TV+ adaptation of Cape Fear, stepping into a role once played by Robert De Niro (if you haven’t seen it, he’s amazing), and in the upcoming Dune: Part Three.

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@thebubblecomWE KNOW NOTHING. #laroja #fifa #mundial #spain #españa

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Hallelujah!

🇻🇦The Pope gave a speech and somehow every politician agreed with him

Holy week. Fifteen years after the last papal visit, Pope Leo XIV landed in Spain on Saturday morning with a full-blown, high-octane tour that feels like a religious roadshow that could compete with Bad Bunny.

• Party! From a massive open-air mass in Plaza de Cibeles (1.5m attendees!) to the hair-raising, waterworks-inducing blessing of the iconic Sagrada Familia last night, and now heading to Canary Islands migrant centers, the pope’s been busy with spectacle, symbolism, and politics.

• Thank god for a break. For Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the pope’s visit couldn’t have come at a better time. With legal troubles and corruption cases swirling around him and pals like former PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the papal tour frenzy shifted the spotlight (if for only a minute).

Guess who. It was on Monday that Madrid witnessed something close to a miracle: the pope delivered a historic speech in Parliament, and every major political party walked away claiming, somehow, that he was basically on their side.

• You guys agree? In a chamber better known for screaming at each other than agreement on anything, MPs from across the spectrum applauded for over seven minutes.

• Even more surreal? Center-left PSOE, center-right PP and far-right Vox all insisted the Pope’s message aligned with their own political platforms. For real?

Listen up, sinners. The pope’s 30-minute speech (see above) itself was anything but neutral. Leo XIV touched on some of the most divisive issues in Spanish politics: immigration, abortion, euthanasia, education, war, and the toxic tone of public debate. If he didn’t opine on onions in tortilla de patata, it was probably due to a lack of time.

• On immigration, he was crystal clear. This is not a numbers game but a moral issue, calling for dignity, legal pathways, and integration.

• But… on the other hand, he doubled down on the Church’s traditional stance that life must be protected “from conception to natural death,” clashing with Spain’s loose laws on abortion and euthanasia.

• He also defended parents’ rights in education (a nod to religious schooling), warned about the dangers of AI, and called out the increasingly aggressive tone of political discourse. Disagreement, he said, should not mean humiliation. (We all can agree with that, right?)

Choose your own adventure. The reaction from politicians was a masterclass in selective listening. As it turns out, everyone agreed on one thing: no one felt criticized! On the contrary, political leaders, right and (mostly) left, seemed to think that His Holiness agreed with them and only them (which is obviously absurd).

Hits for everyone. The right was most directly confronted on immigration, peace, and international law, areas where the pope’s stance clashes clearly with both the PP and Vox. The left didn’t get off easy either, facing a head-on challenge on abortion, euthanasia, and education. Even nationalist parties caught a subtle jab, with Leo XIV emphasizing unity over division.

• The PP. Boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo said he felt like the pope spoke directly to him, insisting the speech fit perfectly with the PP’s humanist roots.

• Vox. Party leader Santiago Abascal also saw no contradiction with his party’s stance on immigration (despite the pope explicitly condemning the kind of “national priority” logic that Vox promotes).

• PSOE and the left, led by PM Sánchez, highlighted the parts about international law, migration, and human dignity they agreed with, brushing past the pope’s clear opposition to some of their flagship social policies.

🙉 Everyone agreed. Because of course. The whole thing was political projection at its finest: take what you like, ignore the rest, and declare yourself the pope's #BFF. So who actually took the biggest hit? The answer is: pretty much everyone.

More news below. 👇👇

🔔 But first… The Bubble Podcast is back for season 2!

In the first episode of this season, we discuss PM Zapatero’s corruption accusations, the very complicated relationship between the US and Spanish governments, and the World Cup. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube!

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 👩🏻‍⚖️ Sánchez’s ‘beloved brother’ case is done except for the crying ruling

The best part of any court case? The closing statements, where each side blasts the other’s case and indulges in some theatrical badassery. That’s what we got this week as hearings wrapped in the trial of PM Sánchez’s hermanísimo David and the bullshit patronage job he was — or wasn’t — given in Badajoz (we wrote about this last week).

• The accusers went first. Lawyers for the various right-wing parties and lobbies called the creation of a “made-to-order” post for David a “farce”, said his “complete sham” of an interview for the position “never took place,” and that his “only merit” for holding the job was being “Pedro Sánchez’s brother.”

• The defendants were cutting. Miguel Ángel Gallardo, the former leader of the PSOE in Extremadura who faced trial for the supposedly illicit hiring of David, said his only crime was “not having the same ideas as the accusers” and that he’d already been “condemned socially”. Defense lawyers called the case “a house of cards,” and the plaintiff claims “a fictional script...devoid of the slightest sense.”

Now the screaming is done, and the case goes to the tribunal. Here are 5 issues to watch as you await the ruling:

1. Police report vs. people. The UCO analyzed thousands of emails and concluded the job was “predetermined” for David — pointing to Gallardo as the engine. But many of the 53 witnesses — and the state prosecutor — said otherwise. Who wins: one police report or half a courthouse of witnesses — mostly with ties to the PSOE?

2. David vs. David. His instruction-phase testimony was a slow-motion car crash: he couldn’t locate his own office, left 10-second silences, and rambled about his job title. His lawyers nearly silenced him at trial. The old videos were played in court anyway. Can his past self convict today’s David?

3. That “Hermanísimo” email. An email sent the day the job was posted — subject line: “Hermanísimo” — was the prosecution’s marquee exhibit. In court, its author walked it back to “a rumor I can’t source.” The tribunal’s president all but dismissed it. So, evidence or just a meme?

4. The ghost of Pedro. Five emails allegedly sent to Pedro’s personal account (but actually, it seems, to the account of his father, who has the same name) were unveiled at the last minute — with one plaintiff claiming they were deliberately left uninvestigated by the UCO after it was told to “stand down” by… the government 🤔? There are no charges against Pedro himself, but the accusation that political pressure shaped the investigation hangs over the whole thing.

5. Prosecution vs. prosecution. The state prosecutor asked for the acquittal of all 11 defendants. The right-wing groups want 6 years for David. Defense attorneys formally asked the court to make the accusers pay costs for “procedural bad faith.” Whoever loses won’t be quiet about it.

Tick-tock. The ruling could take until after August — no one is in pretrial detention, so the court has no urgency. Spain will have to wait.

2. 💎 A priest walks into a bar jewelry store

Wasn’t the Pope’s visit stirring? Well, apparently average Spaniards and politicians of all stripes weren’t the only ones to take inspiration from Leo XIV’s tour of Spain. But for some, it didn’t go so well.

• What happened: The Policía Nacional arrested seven people for the holdup of a Madrid gold shop yesterday afternoon. Three of the gang entered the store: two — dressed as a priest and a nun — asked an employee to show them a jewelry display, while the third violently forced her into the back room.

• Police caught them as they fled. During the arrest, the “priest” pulled a gun on two officers and had to be subdued. The costumes, police noted, were “not of very good quality.” The commitment was there. But the craft? Um, less so.

Not a one-off. This was Madrid’s sixth jewelry robbery in a month, all brazen, all in daylight, all apparently unconcerned with cameras or bystanders. A brief tour:

• May 15: A gold shop in Torrejón de Ardoz was robbed by five people who tricked an employee into opening the door. Estimated haul: €500,000.

• May 18: Four masked robbers hit a Puente de Vallecas shopping center with hammers, stuffing loot into raffia bags.

• May 22: A man and woman entered a jewelry store on Calle Toledo with a gun — which they left behind and turned out to be fake — pistol-whipped the owner in the head, and fled with the loot. At least she’s okay.

• June 2: Three hooded figures in military gear hit the José Luis chain at La Vaguada — Madrid’s first shopping center — making off mainly with Casio and Guess watches. Not exactly the crown jewels.

• June 8: Four more hit José Luis again in Torrelodones, this time with what witnesses described as a submachine gun.

The suspects. All seven arrested yesterday are Peruvian nationals. Two were picked up nearby as lookouts; two more were caught in a getaway car on the M-30, which crashed into a police vehicle. All face charges of robbery with violence and intimidation. Police are investigating whether they’re linked to the other recent robberies.

• New duds. As far as we know, this is the first time they dressed as men (and women) of the cloth. The Pope truly has inspired us all.

3.🚰 Madrid’s devastating water crisis: the city’s source of pride suddenly tastes ‘funny’

Madrid, what a town! It has a lot of things going for it, but one of its quiet superpowers has always (always!) been its tap water. Ask any local, and they’ll tell you that it’s the best drinking water in the world, hands down. No comparison.

• Seriously, you should never criticize Madrid tap water unless you want to make madrileños very angry. So when water suddenly started smelling and tasting weird this week, people did more than notice. They worried absolutely freaked out.

It started Sunday morning. All over the city (and beyond), people took their first sip of the day and immediately knew something was afoot. Social media exploded. Some said it tasted like chlorine, others like plastic, and others compared it to hospital water or even to drinking from a garden hose.

• Considering this is a city where 96% of people proudly drink straight from the tap, this was borderline identity crisis territory.

So what’s going on? According to Canal de Isabel II (the public company that manages Madrid’s water), the culprit was relatively boring mundane: a filtration adjustment gone wrong.

• Calm down, everyone. It was neither deadly nor dangerous (we hope). It was just that a maneuver involving activated carbon filters at the Santillana treatment plant altered the taste and smell of the water.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. While this may have sounded like the beginning of one of those weird plans concocted by comic book villains to murder thousands, experts say the reason people noticed so quickly is actually a compliment.

• Madrid’s water is famously “soft” (low mineralization), light, and clean-tasting, thanks in part to the granite terrain of the Sierra. So when something changes, even slightly, it’s immediately obvious.

• Some blame increased chlorine levels, possibly due to higher demand (hello, Pope + Bad Bunny!), which may have amplified the effect.

• Still, authorities insist the water was completely safe to drink. By yesterday, the issue had begun to disappear as the system flushed itself out.

The end of the (non) crisis didn’t stop many madrileños from temporarily switching to bottled water (a move that felt almost sacrilegious). It also didn’t stop political parties such as Más Madrid from demanding an explanation.

• Because water in Madrid is holy, and not because the pope was in town.

4. 🚆 Party! Fiesta! The youths get to travel for almost free

They may never be able to buy a home, or have a career not cut short by AI, or find love in the era of smartphone addiction, but at least the youngs have one thing going for them: They can travel across Spain for damn near free this summer! Hey, at least it’s something 🤷.

• What it is. Now in its fourth year, Verano Joven hands out heavily discounted travel passes to anyone aged 18-30 (Spanish national or legal resident) for trips between July 1 and Sept. 30. The government has set aside €130 million this year — €10 million more than last year.

The discounts. 90% off regular state buses and medium-distance trains. 50% off high-speed trains (Renfe, Iryo, Ouigo), capped at €30 per ticket. 50% off Avant. And 50% off a 10-day Interrail Global Flexible pass — so the party can extend to the rest of Europe too.

• How to get it. Register on the Verano Joven website (not live yet — coming “in the next few days”) with your DNI or NIE. You’ll get a personal code to use on each operator’s own site. Non-transferable, so don’t try to share it with your roommate or, like, mom.

The numbers. The program has racked up 4 million users and 16 million discounted trips across its first three editions, with 2025 setting records: 6.8 million trips, up 30% from 2024.

• Transport minister Óscar Puente called it “one of the public policies that has worked best” (shocking how free money is popular) and noted that young people’s desire to travel is “inversely proportional to the money they usually have in their pockets.” Correct, ministro.

Also, it has the nice effect of distracting them from all the world’s other problems. Come to think of it, maybe you could do the same for those who’ve passed 30? (Just asking for a friend.)

5.💊 We're not just a top holiday destination — we're also Europe’s main drug gateway!

Spain has a new nickname that's far less glamorous than “Europe’s Florida”. We’re now the main entry point for drugs into the European Union, at least according to the European Commission and the EU’s drugs agency's latest annual report.

• The numbers are high (pun intended). Spain led the EU in annual seizures of hashish (206 tons) and cocaine (124 tons) — by a wide margin. To put that into perspective: Spain alone accounts for around 37% of all cocaine seized in the entire EU. ☃️

• It doesn’t stop there. The country is also becoming increasingly relevant in synthetic drugs like MDMA, with a growing number of labs being dismantled. Turns out we’re not just a transit country anymore; parts of the supply chain are starting to settle here.

So why Spain? Not surprisingly, geography is responsible for that: Spain sits at the crossroads that join Europe with Latin America (cocaine routes) and North Africa (cannabis from Morocco).

• Drugs come in by sea, often through major ports or the Canary Islands, and then move across the continent. This country is essentially the front door, and the rest of Europe is, well, the house.

Dazed and confused. What’s changing (and worrying Brussels) is how sophisticated the trafficking has become (smugglers are using drones, high-speed narcolanchas in the Strait of Gibraltar, and smaller, fragmented shipments designed to evade detection).

• Law enforcement is catching a lot, but the report makes it clear: traffickers are adapting fast, and the game is getting harder.

We’re #1! Countries like Belgium and France are also major hubs (especially ports like Antwerp), but Spain combines entry point, transit route, and production zone — particularly when it comes to cannabis cultivation.

• Meanwhile, the Netherlands still dominates synthetic drug production, but Spain is increasingly part of that ecosystem too. So proud…

🔔 Don’t forget to follow us on TikTok!

@thebubblecomA corruption probe has triggered a political earthquake in Spain: Former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is officially under investigation in a corruption probe linked to the controversial €53 million government bailout granted to the airline Plus Ultra during the pandemic. What happens now? Read all about it in this week’s newsletter, in your inbox this Thursday morning. #zapatero #psoe #venezuela #politica

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Friends in high places

👨🏻‍⚖️ Sánchez’s bro gets his day in court: scam job or “flawless” hiring?

Oh, brother. Spain’s political drama just moved from one courtroom to another, and this time, it’s hitting even closer to home for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. His brother, David Sánchez, is officially standing trial in a case that’s been building for over a year.

• The case centers on his 2017 hiring for a senior cultural role at the Diputación de Badajoz, a job that prosecutors believe may have been tailor-made for him.

• He faced charges of influence peddling and prevarication. Basically, the prosecution said he got a B.S. patronage job given because of his brother, didn't work, and lived in Portugal to avoid taxes. One lesser charge, of accepting an illegal appointment, has been dropped because too much time has passed to prosecute it.

• Co-conspirators? Several officials from Extremadura, including former regional PSOE leader Miguel Ángel Gallardo, are accused of playing roles in creating and fast-tracking the position.

• It's a family affair. PM Sánchez’s wife is also under legal scrutiny in a separate case, meaning he is now governing while both his wife and his brother are entangled in court proceedings. Add the scandals surrounding the PSOE party, and 😱.

Not on Infojobs. According to investigators, the role David ended up getting didn’t even exist before he came into the picture. Internal emails show it appearing suddenly in late 2016, with unusual urgency 😒.

• We have rules here. In Spain, public sector jobs are legally required to follow strict principles of merit, equality, and transparency. That means positions must be openly advertised, candidates evaluated fairly, and the selection process based on objective criteria. Personal connections? That’s a no-no.

• But maybe not this time? Spain’s Civil Guard (UCO) says there are “strong indications” the position was effectively pre-assigned to David. One telling detail: before interviews even took place, insiders were already reportedly referring to the role as being for “el hermanísimo”; literally, “the beloved brother.” (Note: Pedro Sánchez wasn’t PM at the time but was already the head of Spain’s socialist party.)

Witness for the prosecution. One key witness, Cristina de Frutos, who was a seemingly highly qualified candidate for the job, told the court she was warned days before her interview that the job was already “his.”

• Move on. Nothing to see here. She says her own interview lasted minutes, with no real questions asked. Her conclusion was that there was no real competition. The defense, in turn, pushes back hard, questioning why she didn’t formally report it at the time and framing it as hindsight rather than proof.

• Fourteen other witnesses — mostly officials from the institution — defended the hiring process, insisting both hires were carried out properly and with “no flaws whatsoever.” (But really? What has “no flaws whatsoever”?)

But wait, there’s more. Two Civil Guard officials have testified that they were told to “stand down” and not actively investigate politically sensitive issues — like this one.

• Yikes. One even claims there was pressure to produce a report concluding “there was nothing there.” Which is bad, because it suggests potential interference at the highest levels. Other agents, however, have denied receiving pressure.

When will it end? It won't.

More news below. 👇👇

💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1.🚫 Feijóo is trying to remove Sánchez now, but it's not looking likely

Cue the Jaws theme. Spain’s opposition is quietly circling the current coalition government. In the middle of mounting pressure on Pedro Sánchez, center-right PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo is exploring whether he can pull off a political Hail Mary: a motion of no confidence that would kick Sánchez out and trigger immediate elections.

• The twist. He needs 176 votes, and his party currently has 137. Add the votes from far-right Vox (33), and he has a total of 170. He’s short six! This means he can’t do it alone, so he’s reaching out to nemeses unlikely partners: the Basque nationalist PNV and the Catalan separatists of Junts. Both of them are (begrudgingly) supporters of the Sánchez government.

• Refresher. A motion of no confidence is one of the few ways to remove a PM in Spain. Sánchez himself used it in 2018 to oust Mariano Rajoy.

It’s all about the timing. Sánchez’s own parliamentary allies are starting to wobble. National elections are scheduled for 2027, but frustration is building. Between political fatigue and a string of corruption scandals that have hit Sánchez's inner circle, several junior partners are openly saying this government is done.

• Feijóo is probing whether those parties would go one step further and actually help bring it down.

• If Feijóo gets the numbers, he says he’d launch what he calls an “instrumental” motion of no confidence (basically, a temporary government whose only job would be to call elections).

• He’s even trying to make it more palatable by promising Vox wouldn’t be part of that interim government.

Not feeling it. The PNV has basically said it wants elections, but it’s not touching a no-confidence vote. Junts? Not surprisingly, it’s been more theatrical.

• The party behind the disastrous (and illegal) independence referendum in Catalonia in 2017, whose leader, Carles Puigdemont, is currently living in self-imposed exile in a McMansion near Brussels, told Feijóo that if he wants to talk, he should travel north to negotiate directly with the big boss in his Belgian abode.

• Feijóo’s response was not enthusiastic: “Let’s talk about serious things.”

• Vox, in the meantime, is furious: They don’t like the idea of Feijóo even considering negotiating with Puigdemont (or cutting them out).

The government responds. First reaction: this is desperation. The government’s spokesperson accused Feijóo of “cynicism” for suddenly courting parties he’s spent years attacking.

• Sánchez himself took a more ironic angle, pointing out that Feijóo now seems to recognize Junts as a legitimate political actor after years of refusing to do so.

Our take. Unless there’s a miracle, it’s unlikely that Feijóo’s plan will move forward. The math isn’t there, and both Junts and the PNV would end up paying a high political cost for siding with the PP and Vox.

• However, don’t rule things out entirely. This is Spain, after all.

2.🐰 Bad Bunny’s Casita isn’t for you (unless you’re rich + hot)

Down the rabbit hole. Bad Bunny is in Madrid to supposedly give a masterclass in stadium shows. Instead, he may have accidentally started a culture war over a tiny pastel-colored house.

• Mi casa es su casa? During his concerts, there’s a second stage called La Casita (“the little house”), a full-blown replica of a traditional Puerto Rican home, right in the middle of the crowd.

• The symbolism. La Casita was born in the short film that accompanied his album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, as a symbol of Puerto Rican identity, memory, resistance, and anti-gentrification vibes.

• Fans loved it so much that his team turned it into a physical centerpiece of the tour. A house that represents “the people.” Except the people don’t seem to be getting in.

Cue the controversy. During the show, Bad Bunny moves around la casita while being surrounded by a very (very!) select group of people. La Casita, as it turns out, has become the most exclusive VIP zone in Madrid.

• We’re talking Ester Expósito, Ana de Armas, Chiara Ferragni, Marta Ortega, Los Javis, plus footballers and influencers. Add to that a handful of “lucky” fans picked from the crowd, and you have the most coveted square meters in Spain right now.

• And those “lucky” fans? Not exactly random. According to some media outlets and pretty much everyone on TikTok, there’s a whole unofficial casting process before the show. Scouts from Bad Bunny’s team roam the stadium looking for young hot girls dressed in a very specific “Caribbean-core” aesthetic (flowers, minis, boots, the whole thing).

• How-to: Right now, there are literal tutorials online explaining how to dress so you (hopefully) get picked.

Why the hate? Because this is the same Bad Bunny who built his brand on breaking norms, defending diversity, and calling out inequality. So watching La Casita turn into what some fans are calling a “showcase of curated bodies and celebrities” has rubbed people the wrong way.

• No Yes, fat chicks. The criticism ranges from “we want fat women” and “this feels classist” to “this completely contradicts his message.” Others, however, are rolling their eyes at the backlash: he’s a reggaeton superstar, not Sumar MP Yolanda Díaz. What exactly were you expecting?

• The controversy got so massive that by Tuesday evening, El País reported that “changes came” to the little house, and people of all ages, sexes, and looks were seen dancing to Benito’s tunes. (Though some VIPs were still seen in the crowd, such as Noah Schnapp, aka Will from Stranger Things, and Victoria Federica, aka King Felipe’s niece.)

Getting surreal. La Casita also spilled into the housing crisis debate after a fake listing popped up on Idealista “selling” the house for €1m, complete with sarcastic copy about exclusivity.

3. 👮 The shove heard ‘round the world country

A push from behind by a policía nacional that left a retired teacher face-planted on the ground turned a teachers’ strike in Valencia into national news this week, with the police union and the national government’s regional rep slapping each other on social media and everyone else asking, “What the f*ck is going on?”

• What happened: Video on Sunday showed a national policeman taking an unneeded detour to knock down a 68-year-old teacher before continuing on his crowd-controlling way, provoking howls across the political spectrum.

The context. Valencia’s public school teachers have been on indefinite strike since May 11, now entering week four, demanding better pay, lower class ratios, and improved school infrastructure.

• The regional government (PP) offered €200/month more. Two smaller unions (CSIF and ANPE) took the deal. The three bigger ones — STEPV, CCOO, and UGT — refused, demanding that the salary question be fully reopened. The Generalitat says that the point is closed. Both sides have been giving each other the stink eye ever since.

The Twitter war. After the push, government delegate Pilar Bernabé (PSOE) called it “unacceptable” and promised to investigate and “assign responsibilities.”

• No, you! The police union fired back on X that “You won’t investigate anything” and added that teachers who block streets “expose themselves to being removed from them” (because blocking streets isn’t, like, a right).

• Bad boy. The police force has opened a disciplinary hearing against the cop in question.

The tent city. About 150 teachers have set up a small encampment in Valencia’s historic Plaza de la Virgen. The PP-run city government says it’s the PSOE-run national delegation’s job to clear it. The national delegation says it’s the city’s problem.

• The religious event Corpus Christi, which fills that very square, starts this week. Nobody seems eager to move.

What’s next — or isn’t. Strike participation has reportedly collapsed from 50-88% in week one to just 5.29% now (according to the PP gov, so ojo on the numbers), as unpaid days pile up; a teachers rep wrote to us that strikers were being docked €150/day.

• Only 13 school days remain before the summer break. The conflict will almost certainly freeze until September — when, with perfect irony, everyone (strikers included) could return to the status quo, refreshed from two months off and ready to fight.

At least one union has already announced renewed nationwide action in the fall. But hey, for now we’ve got the summer. 🕺

4. 🪂 A princess jumped out of a plane

Spain has been having a bit of a love affair with Princess Leonor, probably because watching her grow from teen to adult is a welcome break from the string of political scandals and weird stories about corpses that have dominated the news. We watched, rapt, as she turned 18! And went shopping in Chile! And hit the beach in a bikini (naughty paparazzi)!

• Now guess what she’s done. She’s jumped out of a plane…more than once!

What’s going on: Last month, Leonor completed the Basic Parachuting Course at the Military Parachuting School Méndez Parada in Alcantarilla, Murcia — jumping multiple times alongside roughly 50 classmates, including at least one nighttime jump, one of the most demanding parts of the training.

• Leonor earned the diploma and badge of Cazador Paracaidista — the “Rokiski,” a metal insignia of wings surrounding a parachute that only goes to soldiers who complete the basic parachuting course. Spain found out when eagle-eyed observers spotted the badge on her uniform at the Armed Forces Day parade in Vigo on May 30.

A royal first. Neither her father, Felipe VI, nor her grandfather, Juan Carlos I, completed parachuting training during their military careers. Leonor is the first member of the royal family to earn the distinction. Felipe, speaking at the parade, said she’d performed “with effort and brilliance.” Peak king dad.

Three years in. The parachuting course capped Leonor’s third and final year of military training — at the Air and Space Academy in San Javier, where she also piloted a Pilatus PC-21 combat trainer.

• Before that: the Army academy in Zaragoza, and six months at sea aboard the Juan Sebastián de Elcano (hence the Chile shopping and bikini spottings).

• This week, she collects her farewell honors from Murcia: a Gold Medal from the region, another from the regional parliament, and the title of Honorary Daughter of San Javier. (Why do royals get “honors” from everywhere they live? We never get any.) She also asked for a photo with Wells, an ex-rapper of whom she's a big fan.

What’s next? Her formal military training wraps up this summer. After three years of jumping out of planes, sailing tall ships, and flying combat trainers, she returns to royal duties full-time — with, it must be said, a considerably more extensive CV than we had at 21.

5. 🇨🇺 ¡We’ll always have Adiós, Cuba!

The U.S. is kicking Spain out of Cuba again. The last time — after the Spanish-American War of 1898 — ended Spain’s last pretensions of empire. This time isn’t so bad, though it does suck if you’re looking for a cheap package vacation.

• What happened: Meliá and Iberostar, two big Spanish hotel chains, announced that they were halting operations on the island after the U.S. administration of a certain Orange Menace threatened to sanction them if they didn’t, um, piss right off.

The island that gave refuge to thousands of vintage American cars and made photographer Alberto Korda famous has long had an uneasy relationship with ‘merica (exploding CIA cigars and all, ya know?).