Pinched Porsche
You would have thought that when a 16-year-old teenager turns up at an ITV station to pass a 70,000-euro Porsche through the ITV check, somebody would have smelt a rat; not least for the fact that a 16-year-old is too young to have a driving licence, let alone the improbability of owning the said vehicle. But amazingly, he sailed through the checks and passed without a hitch… the hitch came later, when he was arrested for stealing the car, but even so…

The surprising event occurred in 2008, in Granada. The lad was approached by an adult who proposed an interesting deal: the stranger needed somebody to get the Porsche Cayman S – with 300 hp, capable of obtaining 300 kph – through the ITV check. The youth accepted and he was given directions to present himself in a villa, just over a 2-hour drive away, in Castilla-La Mancha. The mysterious stranger thought that using a Granada ITV station would be easier than using one there – and he wasn’t wrong, was he!

The car, by the way, was stolen in Milan and the ‘new owner’ needed somebody to risk getting a stolen vehicle through the Spanish ITV system.

Well, the end result was the lad standing before a minor’s judge, around the middle of last month, to hear him dictate a 1-year suspended sentence. The Public Prosecutor recognised the fact that the lad had been set up to carry out the riskiest part of the operation, and any 16-year-old would just love to get the chance to drive a Porsche, wouldn’t he?

Half Not Happy
More than half of the people in Andalucía consulted, considered that the regional administration manages their tax money badly. The output of our regional politicians was also heavily criticised. These are two of the findings contained by an opinion poll conducted by the Centro de Estudios Andaluces.

This opinion poll interviewed 1,200 people across all seven provinces of Andalucía, in search of the ‘social reality’ of the region. At the negative end of the scale, the prime worry of the average Andaluz is unemployment, while at the opposite end – the most positively evaluated – is the public health system and surprisingly, perhaps, public education; i.e. state-school education.

One interesting point is that 70% of those questioned said that they didn’t mind their taxes going up, if it was to help those less well off, but not if the extra money was destined to improving the environment. Secondly, whereas the Spanish male has accepted that he should not have work preference over his female counterpart, it is a different story when it comes to who should have a work preference between Spaniards and immigrants.

Finally, 80% consider that more public money should be spent on health, education and pensions… how very un-American of them!

Murderer or Saviour?
A 21-year-old man allegedly killed his stepfather in defence of his mother, who was being attacked by him. According to neighbours, there were frequent arguments in the house and the son had psychiatric problems.

The police were called out at 23.50h one night at the beginning of last month after they received a telephone call from concerned neighbours, reporting that there was a woman with a head wound and a man who had been stabbed. As you can imagine, as this did not involve towing cars away or strutting around town, the Local Police left it to the National Police… To be fair, within urban settlements, anything that is restricted to the Civil Code is dealt with by the Local Police, whereas anything that would involve the Penal Code is handled by the Guardia Civil or the National Police, depending on the size of the town – as this was a city (Sevilla), it fell to the National Police.

Shortly after arrival, the police arrested the 21-year-old, who has a criminal record, accused of stabbing the 41-year-old man, as when they burst through the door, he was still brandishing the bloodied knife, which was a bit of a give away.

Talking of Sevilla
Still in the same province (¡Viva Sevilla y Ole Fandango!) a male hairdresser was arrested for filming his employees in the toilet. He allegedly stored the wickedly obtained images on his computer, adding over smutty subtitles. (¡Aquí hay un peluquero que no se corta ni un pelo, oye!)

After having filmed dozens of clients, as well as his female assistants, he was rumbled when one of his victims noticed a sniggering camera. A total of 16 ‘film stars’ joined together to present a combined lawsuit against the hairdresser

Granada Comes First!
Did you know that the Province of Granada produces almost half of the total cannabis crop cultivated in Andalucía? No you didn’t – come off it! Yes, Granada is a mean machine in this particular field because the amount of wonky plants confiscated has increased by 229% in the last year.

The National Police and the Guardia Civil bagged 6,337,577 grams (6.3 tonnes) of the stuff, representing 45% of the total amount confiscated in the region. But it’s not only cannabis that is growing like weeds here, but also a few of the old opium poppies – move over, Afghanistan!

In the ‘pop a poppy’ stakes Granada produce 45.4% of the national total… there goes the Royal British Legion’s September supply. I was going to add: *sniff!* but you would have probably thought that I had a rolled up banknote in my nostril…

As for drugs in general, according to a report published by the Ministry of the Interior, the police forces seize, on average, 23 Granadinos with some sort of drug on them… every day; (by taking the total figure of 8,406 per year).

Oof!
Some consider that the building trade is dropping off – well, at least parts of it are: a builder and a passing elderly lady were injured when scaffolding fell from the 2nd-floor of a building in Guadix. OK, so it’s not funny, but neither is being born, but the first thing that you find is a lot of grinning faces around you, right?

Anyway, the accident occurred around midday when the scaffolding was being taken down from around a renovated building in a central street of this northern-Granada town. The 33-year-old builder was a specialist in erecting scaffolding – not so hot in taking it down, apparently. Both the man and the 74-year-old woman were flown by helicopter to Granada’s main hospital (Virgen de las Nieves – Trauma) from the smaller hospital in Guadix, owing to the severity of their injuries.

Things could have been worse, if the accident had occurred an hour or so later, as the building work is right next to a secondary school.

More Expense
Almost 200,000 homes within the province must install consumption limiters within their electric main fuse boxes or they will be fined. The installation of the device costs, on average, 50 euros.

OK, don’t panic because it is more than likely that you already have one, as we are talking about the main trip switch (circuit breaker) in your fuse box – it is designed to trip when you start to draw more watts than you have a contract for. The Spanish term is ICP (Interruptor de Control de Potencia). Any dwelling built in the last ten years has one, or if you have had your electrical system updated in this time.

However, Sevilla-Endesa calculates that there are between 200,000 and 250,000 dwellings that don’t, which means that we are talking about half of their clients.

Right! What to look for: Just have a quick look in your mains box and on the right hand side you should have a trip switch with the letters ICP written on the bottom. If you haven’t got one, then this concerns you. It will cost you around 50 euros to have one installed (40 euros for the trip and nine euros to have it checked by the electricity company. It will cost you more, of course, if the main fuse box doesn’t have room for one and you have to have a bigger box fitted.

How much time do you have to fix it? There is no deadline: the electricity company will send you a letter to say that you need one. If they receive no reply within 20 days, they send another. If there is still no reply in a further 20 days, then you receive another warning containing a fine. If you still do nothing about it, they start putting a surcharge of between 15 and 30 euros a month until you get it fixed.

From a legal/economical point of view, if you have never received a letter about it, you have no problem, but from a safety point of view, the thing is designed to stop you burning your house down. Your call.

Tragic Underestimation
Each summer we used to run a double-spread article on the work of Infoca, the fire prevention and extinction service. This year we aren’t because it has been covered and covered again, each time emphasising the fact that Andalucía in the summer is far removed from the lush, green pastures of Northern Europe, and indeed, Northern Spain. However, reading about a German family who came to grief here during last month whilst on excursion in the campo indicates that you can never over do it with these warnings.

The Guardia Civil were already expecting the worst, when they came across a German mother at a gasoline station near Córdoba, disorientated, scratched and bruised.
She had become separated from her 5-year-old son whilst on excursion near the inhospitable and arid zone near the Santuario Virgen de la Estrella (Espiel, Córdoba). The Guardia Civil immediately mounted a search operation, which ended sadly with the location of the young boy’s corpse in the early hours of the morning. The boy was lying under a bush, were he had evidently sheltered from the intense sun – the temperature had been around 40ºC that day. Lying next to the body were two backpacks and a 1.5l bottle of water – empty.

No, but then, Yes
Granada Football Club had heaps of unwanted media attention on the 22nd of July, when a representative of the club frantically demanded that the rubbish collection service opened an underground rubbish container so that they could retrieve bags of rubbish.

The reason for this unusual and urgent request was that around 80,000 euros had been thrown away by mistake within one of their rubbish bags.

The club, during the whole day of the incident, adamantly denied that the recovered bags contained any money at all, but thanks to an ‘on-the-ball’ press photographer, close up shots of the bags being handed over to the anxious officials, showed quite clearly that there were bundles of 200-euro notes contained within, visible through the semi-transparent blue bags.

The next day the club surrendered to the inevitable and called a press meeting and confessed that there had indeed been money in the bags. They explained that one of the staff had been counting takings from the sale of season tickets and had left the money in an umbrella stand whilst he went to the toilet. During his absence, a cleaning lady saw ‘papers’ in the stand and emptied them in her rubbish bag and threw it out. The chap returned from the toilet to find that the money had disappeared. The balloon went up (panic ensued), the mistake discovered and frantic phone calls to the municipal rubbish collection made because the hopper where the bags were dumped cannot be accessed because they are underground ones.

Well, that’s their account and they are sticking to it. But why 24 hours of denial? Was it ‘funny money’? At the press call was a representative from the local law court to lend credence to the clubs explanation. The club, you see, has been under judicial supervision owing to its state of solvency. Well, is there something at the football club that is just not cricket?

Inaccessible Water
There’s a plenitude of water behind Rules Dam, so much so that 7,000 cubic metres of it is gushing out into the river bed below, which for the end of the July seems strange, if it were not for the fact that there is nowhere else for the water to go, anyway, thanks to a lack of irrigation infrastructure.

As you can imagine, farmers on the coast are hopping mad, because they have to pay huge electricity bills to pump water out of the ground for their irrigation wells. It is estimated, in fact, that these 9,000 farmers spend just over 2-million euros a year on the electricity consumed by this activity.
But you don’t have to be a farmer to feel annoyed, because anybody who has lived on this part of the coast during a drought can only feel incredulity to see the water from the thaw on Sierra Nevada swilling itself down and out into the sea.

Granada is plagued by incomplete infrastructure; be it autovías, dams or urban projects like underground car parks, which is why on the 27th of July the business sector and concerned citizens got together to make a public protest and demand that this lamentable state of political incompetence be rectified – and now!

Incredibly, the construction of the Rules Dam was complete – if that is not a inaccurate interpretation of the word – in 2003, but since then, owing to either the lack of an obligatory emergency contingency plan, followed by delays to the autovía bridge that crosses the reservoir and now the continued inexistence of a water distribution system, it remains brimming and useless.

The responsible department for the dam points out that the water is not being wasted, but that via the riverbed it reaches the older irrigation networks in the Vegas of Motril and Salobreña. But this is hardly a consolation, because if literally millions hadn’t been spent on the dam in the first place, this is exactly what would be happening anyway. Null points.

Emergency Overload
Such was the amount of demand on the Emergency Department of the main hospital in Granada that a nurse had to use a megaphone to tell everybody to piss off home, unless they were really, really sick.

The trouble is, you see, that people use the Emergency Departments of hospitals and medical centres as a short cut to see a doctor, rather than making an appointment to see their GP. Subsequently, such facilities are brimming with genuine emergency cases, as well as people that could easily wait until the next morning to see their normal doctor. In fact, during the early hours, people with no place else to go, use it as a warm retreat from the streets in winter.

Bearing this in mind, on Monday evening the Emergency Department of La Virgen de las Nieves (Trauma) had 246 people queuing up to be ‘attended.’ Finally, as mentioned above, a nurse, armed with a megaphone, reached the end of her tether (limit of her patience) and told the multitude to go home unless theirs was a true emergency case.

Sheet Giveaway
The Policía Nacional managed to track down a burglar because, thanks to the fact that they hung out some stolen sheets on their balcony to dry…

A house was broken into about a month ago in Albaicín (the old town of Granada). The thieves took everything that they could get their hands on, even some distinctive sheets from a bed, which was their ultimate undoing.

You see the ‘burglars’ were squatters from a nearby building. And when the police raided the house, they found stacks of stolen stuff from their unwitting neighbour – even the taps, paintings, the gas water heater and electric radiators.