| Dear Olive Press readers, | | Welcome back to another round-up of this week’s news in Spain. | | It’s been a somewhat unusual one as we are really at a seasonal crossroads, with the weather gods unable to make their minds up as to which disasters to afflict upon us. | | So they hit us with both fires and floods. | | The week started with a hair-raising inferno breaking out on Sunday in the hills just a short distance from Benahavis, one of the Costa del Sol’s plushest and most exclusive enclaves. | | Residents were evacuated from their villas as a precaution as the flames encroached, and the redoubtable Plan INFOCA (Andalucia’s firefighting outfit) heroically battled the flames to a standstill before any expensive homes were torched. | | The fire was declared stabilised first on Monday (Sept 14), then once again on Wednesday morning, then after another flare up, it was declared stabilised yet again on Thursday. Now it is officially ‘controlled’. So they can’t roll that one back, surely. | | But at the same time as all this drama was going on, Spain’s east coast was being placed under cascading red alerts for incoming storms. | | Barcelona and Valencia took a real battering, with thousands of football fans at the Camp Nou watching Barca take on Racing Santander all receiving the unsettling ES-Alerts to their phones simultaneously. | | Sadly one life was claimed in Olivella, Barcelona province, after a man’s car was swept away in flash floods. | | The storms and red alerts pushed further south to both Murcia and the Almeria coast, which also took a real battering. | | In other news, Gibraltar celebrated its first National Day since the border came down, as locals and nearby residents still mull over the pros and cons of the new state of affairs. | | And one visitor to the Costa del Sol nearly got away with a horror crime after he ran over a 12-year-old boy and sped off, leaving him with a fractured skull. | | Sterling work from the boy’s brother and the Policia Local enabled them to track down the car to a Malaga airport rental firm – and catch the suspect as he sat on board a flight to Manchester nervously waiting to take off. | | On a final note, there has been absolutely frenetic police action against Spain’s narco gangs and drug traffickers in the last few weeks, with no fewer than five major busts (measured in the tonnes of cocaine seized) carried out this summer alone. Mostly in the Costa del Sol. | | It would be a separate newsletter in itself - Spain’s narco war untold. Let me know if there’s interest in this at newsdesk@theolivepress.es and we’ll consider if we can produce it. | | Thanks all and enjoy the weekend, | | | | Edificio Centro Comercial El Duque, first floor, Carretera N340, km 144.5 | | San Luis de Sabinillas, Malaga 29692, Spain | | Copyright © 2026 The Olive Press, All rights reserved. | | | |
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