Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.
And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’
NB: If there’s a RV in brackets after a (paywalled) link, you might be able to read it via a Reader View extension to your browser, avoiding the paywall. If there is no RV, it will mean that the article is free to view or listen to. If there’s RV2, it means a second click on RV might let you see the article though the first RV click didn’t work.
Cosas de España/Galiza
Politics: The Guardian says here that the PM is a master of the political comeback. But adds that calling a snap election in Spain may be a gamble too far.
The Property Crisis: The PM has – using 2 new decrees – revived his government’s flagship housing reform only a day after its defeat in parliament prompted him to call a snap election. The package, approved by the cabinet, bears only minor changes compared with the version opposition MPs voted down last Friday. Under Spanish law, a decree comes into force as soon as the government approves it. That approval, however, is only temporary: parliament must validate the legislation within 30 days of its adoption by the government. Now, however, parliament has been dissolved following Sanchez’s decision to call a snap general election for November 29. That means the new decrees cannot be put to a vote in the full chamber, with parliamentary functions now being handled by a separate body known as the Diputacion Permanente. This comprises 68 MPs plus the president of the Congress president and is responsible for exercising certain parliamentary powers while Congress is dissolved. I’ve no idea what this means down at the coalface.
A couple of quite a shocking statistics:
- 2025 closed with just over 510,000 rental listings in Spain, representing a drastic drop compared to tmore than 902,660 in 2018.
- Barcelona is the city that has lost the highest percentage of rental housing supply (83%) over these 8 years, with a difference of 94,130 – falling from more than 113,850 permanent housing listings in 2018 to 19,723 in 2025).
More here.
Driving in Spain: Another of those temporary campaigns . . . Traffic police across the country have begun a week-long crackdown on distracted driving. Drivers caught using their phones are the main target. Guardia Civil traffic officers, along with any regional and local police forces that join in, will be watching for every kind of distraction on motorways, country roads and in towns until Sunday, October 11. Road cameras will also be used to spot drivers using their phones.
After work had been going on for some months on the creation of a new junction for the AP9 motorway which bypasses Pv city, construction was stopped because the subsoil – an old rubbish dump – was found too weak to support the slip roads. Which was clearly a surprise for the engineers, who might have been expected to test this before the bulldozers were sent in. Anyway, at least a year later, work will start again, presumably because a solution has been found. This will be a bit of a shame as – in the interim – the entire area has self-landscaped rather prettily.
The Middle East War
The latest update from Naked Capitalism.
The United States of Trump America
Trump: An increasingly mad reality TV performer to the last:-
- Democrats are a bunch of dumb sons of bitches. We’re gonna win big and shove it up their ass.
- Natalie Harp – This perfect person. We should go on the road with this show
Others
- Trump’s political toxicity, rampant illegality, and utter incompetence should not obscure a bigger worry: namely, that he is stone-cold nuts. Yet the legacy media continue to use language to describe his “speeches” as ordinary political addresses and “interviews” as within the realm of normal presidential interactions with the press… The Mob boss mentality, lack of logical connection between sentence fragments, self-contradictions, and elementary-school-level vocabulary in a froth of vicious anger reflect a deeply unwell mind — albeit notably less so absent in the sanitized version. Obsessive efforts to explain what Trump must mean are indicative of PR; not journalism
- The lifeblood of MAGA is sadism. [Witness the cheering which met Trump’s remarks about Iran nuking 2 US cities.]
- Mary Trump: Trump’s comment that losing a major American city to Iran would be a very small price to pay in the war he started reveals a disturbing detachment from human life, indicative of a psychopathic personality.
- What has always driven Trump, the reality TV star – The smell of the greasepaint. The roar of the crowd.
I guess the mistake of the vile Stephen Miller and others was to fail to see that you can’t maintain an autocratic government, if a democracy continues to function and the judiciary remains largely impartial. Hitler took the step of eliminating democracy after the Reichstag fire as a prelude to implementing his dictatorship. One hopes that Trump at al are running out of both the time and the means for this. But could still try something drastic around the midterms, of course.
At his latest rally, Trump, who boasts of bringing back manufacture to the US, was wearing a suit made overseas . . .
Relevant Books
- Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest
- To be published on October 27. Can be pre-ordered now: Wtf America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. On Amazon or here. This is not simply a book about Trump. He is the vessel, not the disease – the product of a system decades in the making, fueled by powerful interests, weakened democratic institutions, and a media ecosystem that too often chose access and complicity over accountability. The book confronts the defining questions of our time: How did we get here? Why did so many institutions fail when they were needed most? And what must we do now to defend democracy before it is too late?
- The final pages of Kurt Andersen’s fascinating run through the USA’s history – Fantasyland: How America went haywire. A 500 year history.
- Profiles in Cowardice, by Jacob Weisberg. Cited in this podcast.
The Way of the World
Since 1990, obesity in children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 has quadrupled and is now at the level of 8%.
Spanish
- Pelotón de fusilamiento: Firing squad
- Treta: Ruse, trick, ploy, stunt, scheme, subterfuge, gimmick, scam, trickery, feint.
- Colarse: To creep/sneak into
Did you know?
Finally . . . You Have to Laugh
My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.
The Usual Links
This – from veteran blogger Lenox Napier – is an excellent weekly newsletter (Business Over Tapas) on all matters Spanish. Indispensable for those who needs insights on how and why things happen here.
You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .
I can also be read on X at Thoughts from Galicia. And on Substack here. I no longer post on Facebook.
For new readers: If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.
If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you. And this, on the annual costs of owning property here.
