IT was March 2007 when celebrated expat writer and ex-Genesis drummer Chris Stewart gave the Olive Press his first interview.
The author of half a dozen books on Spain – including seminal tome Driving Over Lemons – told us he was standing for the Green Party in that year’s Spring elections.
Inviting us to his home in Orgiva, near Granada he waxed lyrical about the issues of corruption and over-building on the costas. It is a subject he has returned to many times for us over the last two decades.
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A long-time supporter of the Olive Press, Stewart officially opened our first Costa del Sol office in Manilva in 2014.
He later wrote a feature on how the ‘Collar of Concrete was strangling Spain’ as ever more development went up along the coastline.
What’s the point
In March the following year we revealed how British expat Rob Barclay had been gored at one of the typical local bullrunning festivals that year (something we recently tackled on our website after a Valentines Day death of a pensioner in Ciudad Rodrigo).
The Sevilla-based entrepreneur, from the Barclays bank family, had been taking photos of the 500kg bull at the event in Andalucia when it suddenly turned and gored him, breaking various ribs and leaving him badly bruised.
“I now realise what these guys risk in the ring,” he told us. “Running the bulls like this is an opportunity for the bull to get his own back. He certainly did with me.”
READ MORE: GRAPHIC VIDEO: American youth seriously injured during bullfighting festival in Spain
In one of our best showbiz exclusives we revealed in March 2009 how Lord Alan Sugar, of The Apprentice fame, had bought a villa in the hills above Marbella.
We reported how the former Amstrad and Tottenham Hotspur owner bought alongside two other famous buyers, Crystal Palace boss Simon Jordan and former Page 3 model Suzanne Mizzi. Naturally the story made the UK press the following week.
More recently in March 2015 we revealed how Algeciras has been inexplicably labelled a ‘Taifa’, an Arabic word not used since the middle ages on Google.
We stumbled across it when a former journalist, Tom Powell, was planning to visit the much-maligned Cadiz city.
It came as extremist Muslim group Isis announced its desire to reclaim Al Andalus, ‘the land of our forefathers’.
Most recently in March 2023 we exposed a giant crypto scam based in Gibraltar that may have snared hundreds of foreign victims in Spain.
Under the headline ‘Bitcon’ we revealed how two expats, both Russian, were kidnapped in the so-called Globix scam linked to Ukraine.
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