Costa del Sol has turned into the Costa del Gloom.

Adding to Spain’s economic problems, the Costa del Sol has turned into the Costa del Gloom. The sun still shines, but the economic storm clouds have been gathering for some time and are now raining on the property developers’ parade.
Holiday and retirement homes that once looked like sure shot investments are now dropping in value. Apartments, often bought by speculators, have fallen in value by a third in the last year. Their owners – many from elsewhere in Europe – want to sell, but with mortgages difficult to get, there are few buyers.
More and more building projects are being put on hold, although the infrastructure is in place the homes will have to wait for better times.
After years of strong demand, fuelled by low interest rates, the Spanish property bubble finally burst. One of the most high profile victims was Spain’s largest developer Martinsa-Fadesa, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month.
Economics professor Juan Carlos Martinez said it is just the beginning: “What is clear is that many companies are facing a very complicated situation in which they have bought land, getting seriously in debt to do so and that, in today’s world you have to pay the money back. So if they are not getting any money from their principle business which is the sale of property what they have to do is get rid of dead weight, that is to get rid of certain assets they may have.”
The economic downturn has seen nearly a quarter of a million people have joined the jobless rolls in the last three months. In Spain’s building sites, the signs read ‘Not hiring.’
One unexpected side effect, French vineyards are seeing the return of Spanish grape pickers. For several years, they had had so much work back home that the flow of seasonal workers across the border had all but stopped. This year 12,000 are expected for the harvest in southern France.

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Posted in: Costa del Sol

prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability

prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability, are going bust.
the Costas, developments lie half-finished, without water and electricity, and without any prospect of being sold.For Spain's notoriously corrupt and capricious planning regime, which gave birth to the developments now disfiguring virtually all the country's Mediterranean coastline, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Houses built on the nod of corrupt mayors are being refused retrospective planning permission by regional administrations under pressure from the green lobby. Many properties, new and not-so-new, are blighted by illegality and are the effectively worthless; others have simply been demolished.Scan the websites used by current or potential British expatriates and you will find people desperate for advice about how to reclaim deposits that they will, in many cases, never see again - and all at the wrong end of life, when lost savings cannot be recouped.Even the biggest Spanish firms are going under. Last month, Martinsa-Fadesa, a major and respected player, filed for bankruptcy.Gwilym Rhys-Jones is a financial investigator based on the Costa del Sol, and a longtime observer of the Spanish property scene. He says that even large, well-known builders were accepting deposits for off-plan developments that had no planning permission."These things are no more than pipe dreams, but there was such a ready supply of British and north European buyers that all they had to do was show them a pretty drawing and they were falling over themselves to buy them."Drive along the coast south of Alicante and the results of the Spanish property bubble are there to see: serried ranks of exquisitely tasteless, often empty, villas advancing in close order up isolated, parched hillsides.Many have been built in locations totally unsuitable for housing: by the sides of dual carriageways, away from shops and amenities - anywhere that developers could find a landowner willing to sell.Property has driven the Spanish economy like no other in the European Union. Last year, housing investment accounted for a tenth of GDP and 13 per cent of private sector jobs.

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Posted in: British expatriates

former wife of BBVA executive, Andrés Toro Barea, who was murdered in Bollullos de la Mitación (Sevilla) last June, may have used a relative's gun

former wife of BBVA executive, Andrés Toro Barea, who was murdered in Bollullos de la Mitación (Sevilla) last June, may have used a relative's gun to commit the crime.
NRCS, who had separated from her former husband several months before his murder, was arrested last Tuesday and remanded into preventive custody following a preliminary court hearing two days later. Mr Toro's body was found on June 16th by colleagues concerned that he had not turned up for work. Since the break-up of his marriage, the 55-year-old banker - who was the director of the BBVA's debt-recovery department for western Andalucía - had been living on a part-time basis in the villa on the La Juliana residential estate in Bollullos where he was found dead on June 16 (photo).

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Posted in: Bollullos de la Mitación (Sevilla)

Figures from the Spanish tourist board show the number of Brits holidaying in Spain in the second quarter to June fell by 5 per cent

Figures from the Spanish tourist board show the number of Brits holidaying in Spain in the second quarter to June fell by 5 per cent compared to last year. Overall, the number of visitors to Spain was down 0.7 per cent. Of course, the British love affair with Iberia has not ended yet - Spain is still our favourite holiday destination, attracting about 12 million visitors each year. But the effect of the credit crunch, combined with the strength of the euro and the choice of cheaper destinations, has led many British tourists to say 'adiós España'. Others believe the British may also be tiring of the Spanish formula of sun, sand, sea and sangría. Frances Tuke, of the Association of British Travel Agents, says the bubble may have burst for Spain, which has seen a steep rise in visitors since 1997. 'People have different choices, perhaps we are tiring of the same thing.'
Down the coast from Benidorm, Marbella has long been a resort favoured by retired soap stars and a certain type of perma-tanned Briton. But there are hints here that, just like Benidorm, holidaymakers may be turning their backs on its charms.
Fewer Britons are filling the leather seats at Giangrossi, a 'designer ice cream lounge bar'. Owner Joanna Dunbar says she has heard complaints along the coast about the drop in visitor numbers. 'I grew up here and would defend the place, but I would not come here as a tourist. I don't blame people for looking elsewhere.'
Dunbar said people had been put off by a multimillion-pound civic corruption scandal which had led to the dissolution of Marbella city council and left hundreds of British property owners fearing that their illegally built homes could be demolished. José Luis Zoreda, vice-president of the industry body Alliance for Tourist Excellence, said the drop in British visitors 'clearly sounded the first alarm bells'. Other countries have seen tourist numbers rise - Turkey and Egypt by 15 per cent and 22 per cent respectively in the second quarter of 2008.

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Posted in: Marbella

Spain police have made their biggest heroin seizure when drugs with a street value of more than 54 million euros ($89.6 million) were found at Sitges

Spain police have made their biggest heroin seizure when drugs with a street value of more than 54 million euros ($89.6 million) were found in the Mediterranean port of Sitges.The 316.5kg of heroin were taken from a US-flagged ship and loaded on a van with a Dutch licence plate, police said in a statement. Five men, four of Turkish origin and a Romanian were detained.The drugs were in 633 packages.It is one of the biggest heroin busts in Europe and it is the first time that smugglers have been caught by Spanish police trying to bring the drug into the country by ship, the police statement said.
"We have managed to discover and dismantle a method of introducing heroin, by sea, which was unknown to date, even at the European level, which is especially dangerous," the statement said.Police said they began their investigation in February by monitoring a Dutch national of Turkish origin who was arrested in 1994 for being the leader of a group that smuggled 118kg of heroin into Spain.
He was one of the five men detained on Thursday.Spain, with its extensive southern coastline, is Europe's main point of entry for Moroccan cannabis and for cocaine from South America, mostly from Colombia, the world's top producer of the drug.

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Posted in: Sitges

Marbella Police in action

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Posted in: Marbella

Police have arrested nine people from the Costa Blanca on suspicion of peddling liquid ecstasy via the internet

Police have arrested nine people from the Costa Blanca on suspicion of peddling liquid ecstasy via the internet. They say the substance is highly dangerous and the bottle carries a warning that it is ‘unsuitable for human consumption’. A total of 12 people from the provinces of Alicante, Malaga and Madrid were detained last week and found to be in possession of 14 litres of Gamma Butirolactona (GBL).This is primarily an industrial solvent used for metal cleaning and removing paint, and also used in farming and the pharmaceutical industry, police explain. GBL is also a main ingredient in the perilous designer drug known as liquid ecstasy.A high volume of sales by individuals not involved in industries where it is used aroused officers’ suspicions a year ago.
Since that time, some 15 people have been hospitalised after taking GBL orally.
Police say that further arrests have not been ruled out.

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Posted in: Costa Blanca

Come visit Spain, the European point of entry for cocaine

A study of randomly selected Spanish euro notes carried out by chemists at the University of Valencia (UV) has shown that they contained traces of cocaine at an average concentration of 155 micrograms, which is the highest rate in Europe, according to an article published in the latest issue of Trends in Analytical Chemistry. The researchers also carried out a comparative study of the methods currently used in detecting the presence of cocaine on bank notes worldwide.
It may seem like an odd marketing campaign but "Come visit Spain, the European point of entry for cocaine" remains apt.Spanish Money Contains Higher Traces Of Cocaine Than Any Other European CurrencyThe most recent report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warns that Spain is still the major point of entry of cocaine into Europe. In 2006, 41% of all hauls of the drug made on the continent were made on Spanish soil, where 50 metric tonnes were seized, followed by Portugal, with 35 metric tonnes. The UN also says the rate of cocaine use doubled in Spain between 1999 and 2005, increasing from 1.6% to 3% of those aged between 15 and 64, which is more than twice the rate for western Europe as a whole (1.2%).
“I find it profoundly embarrassing that we now all have cocaine in our wallets” - Miguel de la Guardia. Graphic: M. de la Guardia et al.“The latest technology means we can now carry out quantitative analysis of cocaine traces on any bank note, and as a result we can confirm that – at least in Spain – traces of the drug are found not only on notes that have been in direct contact with it, but on nearly all the notes in circulation,” said Miguel de la Guardia, co-author of the study and a professor in the Analytical Chemistry Department of the UV, in an interview with SINC. He explained that this was due to “cross contamination” between bank notes, as well as in money counting machines used by banks.
The chemist told SINC that the methods used to extract cocaine from the bank notes and to analyse it depended upon whether it was necessary to detect the drug quickly, in which case direct application methods are used (in which the drug is not separated from the bank note), such as thermal dissolution, with detection by mass spectrometry, ionic mobility spectrometry, or immune testing (with an antigen-antibody recognition system).Mass spectrometry is also used if the priority is to determine the exact amounts of cocaine on a note. However, in this case it is necessary to first separate the drug from the notes, using methods such as gas chromatography, liquid chromatography or capillary electrophoresis, using organic solvents.The study also analyses previous studies highlighting the concentrations of cocaine found in different currencies around the world, as well as the results of the random sample of Spanish bank notes gathered by the Valencian chemists, which detected concentrations of up to 889 microgrammes of the drug on some notes.
In the United States, which has the most highly contaminated bank notes of any country in the world, dollar bills containing more than 1,300 microgrammes of cocaine have been registered, although the average values were between 2.86 and 28.75 microgrammes, varying according to the year and city.The study also reveals that German euro bank notes have a cocaine concentration traces five times lower than that of the Spanish ones. With Irish bank notes, one statistic indicates that of 48 notes studied the highest concentration found was 0.576 microgrammes.
Another study, carried out on 356 Swiss franc notes, found that only 6% were contaminated with the drug (at concentrations above one nanogramme per note). The researchers were unable to find any quantitative data in the scientific literature relating to British pounds, but semi-quantitative data from a few years ago suggested that between 40% and 51% of bank notes were contaminated with cocaine, at levels of 0.0011 microgrammes per note.
The publication points out that there is an “unequivocal” relationship between the high levels of cocaine found in both American dollar bills and Spanish euro notes and the high consumption of the substance in both countries.
De la Guardia believes that cocaine “has become rooted in Spanish society, and is playing Russian roulette with the neuronal development of an entire generation”, and that for this reason greater efforts must be made to reduce consumption, as well as to destroy the glamorous image of cocaine “which is often portrayed by the media”. “I find it profoundly embarrassing that we now all have cocaine in our wallets,” the researcher added. Article: S. Armenta, M. de la Guardia. “Analytical methods to determine cocaine contamination of banknotes”.

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Posted in: Article: S. Armenta,M. de la Guardia. “Analytical methods to determine cocaine contamination of banknotes

30 year old grape farmer from Villanueva de Alcardate (Toledo) found dead last night, died of heat stroke.

30 year old grape farmer from Villanueva de Alcardate (Toledo) found dead last night, died of heat stroke. According to local mayor, Jorge Luis Garrido, the dead man, Pedro Pablo MP, left for his vineyard at around 5pm yesterday afternoon to install a new irrigation system. After he failed to return by nightfall, his father and brother went out to look for him, but only managed to find his car.
After Local Police and Guardia Civil officers joined the hunt, Pedro was eventually found at around 11.30pm. Maximum temperatures in the Castilla La Mancha region soared above 40ºC yesterday, and the heatwave is expected to last for a few more days at least

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Posted in: Castilla La Mancha

Police in Mallorca investigating sunbathers death

Police in Mallorca are investigating whether a 29 year old Bulgarian man who passed away in Son Llàtzer Hospital last Tuesday, died as a result of heat or sunstroke.
Vladimir suffered severe sunburns last Saturday on Cala Major beach in Palma.
The alarm was raised by a lifeguard who noticed that the man had not moved for several hours.
Police are not ruling out the possibility that the man might have worn himself out while bathing, and fallen asleep after reaching the beach.

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Posted in: Mallorca

Ryanair said that its winter cost cutting programme is going to hit Majorca.

Spanish airline industry was rocked by the announcement by the Palma-based airline Spanair that it plans to shed a third of its workforce, Ireland low-cost carrier Ryanair said that its winter cost cutting programme is going to hit Majorca.
While Ryanair has a number of new routes planned out of its Palma hub for December, it will first be suspending all its Palma operations between November 4 and December 19.Ryanair sources explained yesterday that while it is having to battle rising operating costs at Stansted Airport (see Business) the combination of rising fuel prices and Palma being one of the most expensive airports to operate from in Spain makes flying in and out of Majorca during what is considered a relatively quiet period, financially unviable at a time when all airlines are trying to reduce costs.
A total of 372 flights and 56'000 passengers will be affected by the Palma suspension and, according to Ryanair, the airport will lose some seven million euros in revenue from airport unpaid taxes. “If Palma airport had lower operating costs, it would not be necessary for us to reduce our operations and Majorca would not have lost 56'000 potential visitors,” said Ryanair Chief Executive Michael Cawley in a statement released yesterday afternoon. “High fuel prices and Palma’s expensive operating costs make it very difficult for us to keep our airfares down,” he added.
Balearic President Francesc Antich yesterday said that he and his government are “very worried” about the futures of the 1'100 Spanair employees which face losing their jobs here in the Balearics and on the mainland.Antich announced that the government will do all it can to help those made redundant as a result of Spanair’s restructuring plan and also ensure that none of Spanair’s inter-island and Balearic domestic routes are affected. Spanair yesterday confirmed that a total 1'100 jobs are going to be lost.

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Posted in: Balearics

100kg of coc aimne were stolen from police headquarters and replaced with talcum powder

Police in Seville have been left red-faced after more than 100kg of drugs were stolen from police headquarters and replaced with talcum powder, a spokesman said.
The missing drugs, amounting to 95% of the cocaine seized in police operations, would be worth about five million euros on the black market. All the signs are that the thief or thieves who took the drugs were regular visitors, and might even be police officers themselves as there was no sign of the door having been forced.
According to the newspaper El Pais, the keys were usually kept by the head of Seville’s organised crime unit, although he sometimes handed them over to other officers.Seville police when asked to comment, would only confirm that narcotics stored at the police station had “gone missing” and that the internal affairs department had begun an inquiry.The theft was discovered when police carried out a routine final analysis of the drugs before they were destroyed, only to find they were nothing but a harmless material.

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Posted in: Seville

British man threatened members of a gypsy clan known locally as ‘Los Pertolos’ which, according to the court, is well known for its acts of violence.

Married couple have been sentenced to four years in prison by Almeria Provincial Court for extorting money and the ownership of a car from a British man living in Arboleas. The couple, aged 41 and 46, are members of a gypsy clan known locally as ‘Los Pertolos’ which, according to the court, is well known for its acts of violence. The couple threatened the British man, who ran an estate agent’s business in the Arboleas area, showing him a pistol which they told him had “already been used to kill a person” and telling him at the same time that they could “become enemies”. Later they went to the man’s home where other unidentified members of the clan surrounded him and forced him to sign a contract giving work to the accused.
The victim was also forced to give them a document which they then used to transfer ownership of his son’s car to the married couple. The car was later returned to the victim by the Guardia Civil.

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Posted in: Almeria

Expat living in Calpe will be extradited if found guilty of a massive robbery

Expat living in Calpe will be extradited if found guilty of a massive robbery in his home country. The 60-year-old German national is said to have an international arrest warrant hanging over him in connection with a raid on a supermarket in the town of Herne. Guardia Civil officers say criminal damage to the value of 2,200€ was caused and around 30,000€’s worth of goods stolen during the theft in May 2005. The accused has been transferred to the national court in Madrid for trial following his arrest at the weekend.

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Posted in: Calpe

Miguel Merida Gallardo old time Bandido

Miguel Merida Gallardo, a minor thief wanted for around 100 robberies in 1994, followed the example of the Maquis – the Spanish resistance to Franco - and lived in caves for 14 years, subsisting on food and supplies stolen from market gardens and farmsteads. He was last heard of in Baena (Cordoba) in February 1994 and reappeared on July 13 2008 in Alcaudete (Jaen) after a suspicious resident reported him to the PolicÌa Local. Miguel Merida, now aged 48, had two principal “residences” – a cave in Luque (Cordoba) and another in Alcaudete where he kept provisions that included tinned food and a battery-operated television. After being released on parole and spending the night of July 14 in a municipal hostel in Alcalzar La Real, Merida has again disappeared and as a result the Guardia Civil are looking for him once again. However, his whereabouts are apparently still unknown.

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Posted in: Alcalzar La Real

Málaga waiter stabbed

waiter in a Málaga restaurant was stabbed after he asked a beggar to stop bothering his customers. The vagrant smashed plates on the floor before picking up a table knife and attacking the 26-year-old waiter who was not seriously injured. Catering workers have complained that city centre beggars constitute an on-going problem but that complaints to the town hall bring no solution.

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Posted in: Málaga

Wave of arrests investigation into taxfraud involving a bank in Liechtenstein. Costa arrests were in Marbella, Fuengirola, Torremolinos

70 Spanish nationals have been arrested in a major investigation into tax and fiscal fraud involving a bank in Liechtenstein. Four of the detentions were in Marbella, Fuengirola, Torremolinos and Benalmádena and officers have also visited a private bank located in Nueva Andalucía.
According to official sources some 200 million euros is thought to have been involved in the fraud. The 'Jade-Limusina' investigation started in April when the Tax Agency presented the anti-corruption prosecutor with a report indicating that 198 people could be involved in tax evasion. These were all resident in Spain and are thought to have had dealings with the Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT).
This is an international case and started off in Germany where some 1,000 people are though to be involved. As it developed it saw the tax authorities in Spain working with colleagues in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and USA. All these countries had instances of their nationals using the same bank to allegedly avoid paying tax to the authorities.
The case in Spain was placed under the wing of the Audiencia Nacional judge Santiago Pedraz who ordered investigations by the tax authority's own team and the anti-corruption squad of the Guardia Civil. This led to raids on around 20 companies and business advisors in Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and Zaragoza.
The situation of the Nueva Andalucía private bank is not clear. It is believed that the Guardia Civil were at the bank interviewing officials for an hour but no arrests appear to have been made. It is also understood that the same bank could be involved in the German arm of this investigation.
LGT is not only caught up in this fraud investigation. Last week in the USA a hearing of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) of the US Senate also cast doubt on the bank's operations. In a statement LGT Group asserted that: ''it has always conducted its business in accordance with the applicable legal and regulatory provisions. The data under investigation by the PSI - which is based on the data stolen from LGT Treuhand in 2002 and goes back to the 1970s - is from a time when different regulations applied and when there was no Qualified Intermediary (QI) agreement in place. The specific cases mentioned in the subcommittee's report are dated and do not in any way reflect LGT's current business practices.'' Obviously following the wave of arrests in Spain and the parallel investigations in the USA the bank will once again be under the spotlight.

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Posted in: Fuengirola,Marbella,Torremolinos and Benalmádena

Civil Guard is looking for the thieves who broke into the home belonging to their Civil Guard Chief Captain in San Vicente del Raspeig, in Alicante.

Civil Guard is looking for the thieves who broke into the home belonging to their Civil Guard Chief Captain in San Vicente del Raspeig, in Alicante.The chief was asleep with his family in his home in the old Guardia Civil barracks in Babel, where some 20 civil guard families now reside, while the thieves obtained access through a balcony window. The embarrassing theft took place a month ago, but news of it has only just been released. A bag and other items were taken.

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Posted in: Alicante

Prices falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability

prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability, are going bust. Along the Costas, developments lie half-finished, without water and electricity, and without any prospect of being sold.
For Spain's notoriously corrupt and capricious planning regime, which gave birth to the developments now disfiguring virtually all the country's Mediterranean coastline, the chickens are coming home to roost. Houses built on the nod of corrupt mayors are being refused retrospective planning permission by regional administrations under pressure from the green lobby. Many properties, new and not-so-new, are blighted by illegality and are the effectively worthless; others have simply been demolished. Scan the websites used by current or potential British expatriates and you will find people desperate for advice about how to reclaim deposits that they will, in many cases, never see again – and all at the wrong end of life, when lost savings cannot be recouped.
Even the biggest Spanish firms are going under. Last week, Martinsa-Fadesa, a major and respected player, filed for bankruptcy.
Gwilym Rhys-Jones is a financial investigator based on the Costa del Sol, and a longtime observer of the Spanish property scene. He says that even large, well-known builders were accepting deposits for off-plan developments that had no planning permission. "These things are no more than pipe dreams, but there was such a ready supply of British and north European buyers that all they had to do was show them a pretty drawing and they were falling over themselves to buy them."
Drive along the coast south of Alicante and the results of the Spanish property bubble are there to see: serried ranks of exquisitely tasteless, often empty, villas advancing in close order up isolated, parched hillsides. Many have been built in locations totally unsuitable for housing: by the sides of dual carriageways, away from shops and amenities – anywhere that developers could find a landowner willing to sell. Property has driven the Spanish economy like no other in the European Union. Last year, housing investment accounted for a tenth of GDP and 13 per cent of private sector jobs. More than four million dwellings have been built in the last decade, a boom fuelled partly by an influx of British retirees (some three-quarters of a million Britons now reside in Spain). Britain's Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says the number of homes built last year would be excessive even given steady market conditions, never mind a downturn.
But it's on the Costas where the developers are really hurting. La Axarquia is part of Malaga province, a constellation of 29 coastal and inland councils. Ask about the number of illegally built properties in La Axarquia and the official figure will be about 10,000. Local environmentalists put that at more than 20,000.
"In Marbella, the local council is calling on the regional authorities to retrospectively authorise illegally built properties because otherwise mortgages cannot be raised on them," says Mr Rhys-Jones. "In other words, they want to draw a line under the old era." However, he does not believe the property industry will be cleaned up any time soon. "In my town of Estepona, the mayor was elected in May on an anti-corruption ticket. He is now awaiting trial, charged with money laundering, and influence-peddling relating to planning permission."
Housebuilding was popular with ordinary Spaniards, struggling to match the living standards of their more developed partners in the EU. Unfettered building was a vote-winner with local electorates because of the money it injected. Smallholdings, worth next to nothing as agricultural land, suddenly took on great value. Helping it all in recent years was the pound's strength against the euro, making Spain an attractive destination for elderly British couples wanting to maximise their pensions. Now, the pound has dropped and the developers are finding fewer takers from the UK. The result is an enormous glut. Prices are falling relentlessly on the Costas, destroying the hopes of Britons who bought properties as investments.
Tina Reeves, who has worked as an estate agent in Spain for the last 18 years, says tortuous planning laws are part of the problem. "Licences granted by local councils to developers are being rescinded by the regional authorities," she explains. "It's not the fault of the developers, it's the fault of local councils granting licences and not passing it by the region. Also, not many Spanish banks are lending at the moment. They are getting uptight because even they don't know whether anything is legal any more."
Drive inland, a few miles from the Costa Blanca resort of Torrevieja, and you come to the village of San Miguel. As recently as 25 years ago it was an isolated spot, accessible only by a potholed road. Now it is thriving, partly thanks to an influx of expatriates such as Margaret and her friend Melvyn, both from south Yorkshire.
Margaret moved to Spain a decade ago. She feels sorry for people like Peter, but says they are often victims of their own naivety. "People leave their brains at Gatwick. You wouldn't part with your money that easily in the UK, but when they get here, they do. Spanish people will not sign unless everything is in order.
"They bring these people out from England on short breaks and show them a new-build property or a plan and tell them, 'This is your dream' – and it is a dream. The amount of building has gone mad. There is hardly a patch of coastline not built on. When we came here, you would have detached properties with a bit of land. Now it's apartments and houses crammed together."
The value of Margaret's pension has dropped with the pound – the rising euro means she is worse off by the equivalent of a weekly shop – but she says he and her husband would never return to Britain. "I wouldn't go back. I don't think I could afford to live there, to be honest."
Melvyn, a former environmental health officer, is very pro-Spanish. However, he warns: "Corruption is commonplace. They bring you out here and show you a patch of land with a view and it looks beautiful. But when you hand over money you have saved all your life, you find they've built another house a few yards away and there's no view." A few miles away, Peter is sitting in his apartment, musing on the last few years.
"If we went back I think we would say, 'Well, we lived in Spain for two years. It was an experience. There were a lot of good things and a lot of bad.' "
His wife appears more accepting of misfortune.
"I had the image of running private keep-fit," she says wistfully. "You looked out and the mountains were right on top of you. I loved the idea of that."
As a kind of remedy, the couple have been offered an apartment being built at another site. But "it's not what we wanted", says Peter, the stress telling in his voice.
His dream of golf in the morning and a mountain view at sunset is likely to remain just that.

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Posted in: Spain's notoriously corrupt and capricious planning regime

The biggest corporate failure in Spanish history, Martinsa-Fadesa on Tuesday filed a petition for court administration after accumulating debts of EUR

the biggest corporate failure in Spanish history, Martinsa-Fadesa on Tuesday filed a petition for court administration after accumulating debts of EUR 7 billion.
Anecdotal evidence apart - the number of creditors affected in this recourse to court administration is the largest in Spanish economic history - the disaster is clearly due to the profound recession that the Spanish property market is now going through, after two decades of the real estate bubble, in which building companies embarked on a dizzy spiral of indebtedness and excessive construction.
They believed that they were looking at an endless party, but they have now come up against the financial institutions' difficulties in maintaining the necessary flow of loans in a situation of worldwide tightening of liquidity.It would not be fair to take a too distant view of the causes of this particular cataclysm. In trying to understand the reasons for the crash in the building industry, there is a need to keep in mind the long list of absurdities committed in recent years by property developers.One of the main causes is to be found in the obvious imprudence with which the construction industry has been managed.More than a few construction company executives - among others, the president of Martinsa, Fernando Martín - persistently denied that prices of construction company shares were going to fall, or that a contraction of the market was around the corner, even after the disturbing summer of 2007.With such a lack of perception, combined with indigestible deals such as the purchase of Fadesa, it can come as no surprise that Martinsa, with assets of more than EUR 10 billion and a debt amounting to nearly EUR 7 billion, had erred in its calculations and found that it now cannot obtain a EUR 150 million credit.
The financial institution creditors have examined the accounts of Martinsa and have determined that it does not generate sufficient income to back new loans.
This is a rigorous market analysis that ought to have been carried out during the 10 fat years. Had this been done, the firm might now be in a position to weather the storm.The other source of unease now apparent in this crisis is the painful situation of the financial market.The abnormal restriction of credit may mean the coup de grâce for businesses that rely on assets inflated by speculation, as seems to have been the case of Martinsa, but it will also tend to stifle the regular financing of solvent companies.This is the exact point at which the responsibility of the government comes into the picture.It is not a question of the public sector coming to the rescue of the property developers, though there may be many firms as sick as Martinsa.The rules of the game demand that excesses in supply and prices must be paid for.But the government must recognise the real gravity of this crisis. And one of the best ways of doing so is to consider how the drought of credit may be corrected.That way, the innocent will not have to pay for the misbehaviour of the guilty.

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Posted in: Martinsa-Fadesa