Canary

There is a Basque company that is making a fortune with an unexpected business: ripening bananas from the Canary Islands

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100 million euros of turnover ripening bananas. It is the objective of Musanorte, a company with Canarian roots and headquarters in Vizcaya that has turned a niche as specific and far from the focus as the controlled ripening of fruit into an economic engine for the Orozko region. Your task is not to grow, but what happens after the harvest. In their facilities, the Canarian banana arrives green and comes out ready to eat. Controlled maturation. What Musanorte does with bananas is a process that much of the fruit goes through that we see in supermarkets. So that the bananas arrive at the stores at their peak, with that bright yellow tone without darkening, they are placed in chambers in which the temperature and ethylene is applied to them. Ethylene is what is known as maturation hormone and it is released by vegetables naturally. By adding it artificially, the process is accelerated. The company. Musanorte is a subsidiary of Mercamusa, a company dedicated to the marketing of fruit that also has a ripening plant in Alicante. In 2017, Mercamusa was purchased by Eurobananaa Canarian company that sought to eliminate intermediaries and thus better control quality while saving costs. Production takes place in the Canary Islands and the peninsular offices are dedicated to ripening and packaging. Capacity and investment. With more than 21 ripening chambers and two packaging lines, Musanorte has the capacity to manage 40,000 tons of bananas per yearwhich are added to the 30,000 tons of capacity of the Alicante plant. The Musanorte plant has been operational since 2020, but it was not until recently that it received an investment of 24 million euros that has allowed it to increase its capacity. They hope to reach 100 million euros in turnover and also have announced the creation of 100 new jobs in the region. The banana crisis. In 2025 the price of Canary Islands bananas skyrocketed, reaching 7 euros per kilo. In September we talked about the crisis that the banana production sector was going through: Producing them cost more than what the farmers, who survived thanks to aid from the European Union, ended up receiving. The situation has improved, but not enoughand currently production costs remain very highwhich strains the profitability of producers. Image | Wikipedia In Xataka | Neither patting nor waving them in the air: the science of choosing a good melon in the supermarket

the price of fuel does not go down in the Canary Islands

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Last week, the Government launched an emergency plan to cushion the blow of the war in the middle east on the citizens’ pockets. The most visible measure is the reduction of VAT on fuel, from 21% to 10%, which in practical terms translates into around 30 cents less per liter of gasoline and about 20 euros in savings per tank. On the peninsula, thousands of drivers They have already noticed it at the pump since the royal decree It came into effect last Sunday. In the Canary Islands, however, this discount does not exist. And it is basically the consequence of a tax system that has been operating for centuries in a completely different way from the rest of the country. The Canary Islands do not pay VAT. When the Government cuts VAT on fuel, it is modifying a tax that is not applied in the archipelago. In the Canary Islands, the Value Added Tax does not apply, nor does the Special Tax on Hydrocarbons, which do apply in the rest of the national territory. Instead it works the Canary Islands General Indirect Tax (IGIC) and its own regional tax on fuels derived from petroleum. This is because the Canary Islands have a special tax regime within Spain and the European Union, with historical roots linked to its status as an outermost territory. Type difference. The IGIC works in a similar way to the VAT, but its percentages are much lower. While the general VAT rate is set at 21%, the general IGIC is set at 7%. And if the reduced VAT is 10%, the reduced IGIC drops to 3%. This means that every time a driver fills up the tank in the Canary Islands, the consumption tax he pays is less than half that of a driver in Madrid or Seville. In global figures, fuels on the islands support a tax burden of around 25%compared to 50% of the national average. This is done to compensate for the structural extra costs involved in being an archipelago far from the continent, without oil pipelines and with all the energy imported by ship. Margins. The gap in tax rates limits the scope for action on the islands. When the State reduces the VAT on fuel from 21% to 10%, it cuts 11 percentage points. If the Canary Islands Government wanted to apply an equivalent reduction, it would have to take the IGIC from 7% to 0%, and even then. In this way, the economic impact on the consumer’s pocket is not the same, although the proportional effort is comparable. This explains why the savings generated by this type of measures are structurally greater on the peninsula than on the islands. In the Canary Islands they already paid less, but the increase is suffered more. Before the crisis broke out, gasoline was cheaper in the Canary Islands thanks to REF (Economic and Fiscal Regime of the Canary Islands), the application of IGIC instead of VAT and price regulation. But when oil becomes more expensive, the effect is especially abrupt in the archipelago. Most consumer products in the archipelago arrive by ship, including fuel. The rapid rise in crude oil also affects maritime transport, which in the end makes everything more expensive. According to data from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition collected by Dieselogasolinethe average accumulated price of a liter of 95 gasoline in the Canary Islands has gone from 1,181 euros to 1,383 euros since the conflict began. The strategy that the Canary Islands are considering. The regional government of Fernando Clavijo is already working on its own anti-crisis shield. The central measure is to bring the IGIC of fuels to zero rate, eliminating the current 7%. It also contemplates a 99.9% bonus on fuel tax for transporters and deductions in the regional section of personal income tax. Of course, in order to be able to carry it out without breaking the spending rule, the Canary Islands Executive has asked the Ministry of Finance to make this limit more flexible. In Xataka | Chinese airlines are the only ones still flying over Russia. And that is why they are the winners of the Iran crisis

In London more and more people lose money when they sell their house. The question is whether it is the canary in Europe’s mine

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Located north of the Thames, Tower Hamlets is one of the districts most emblematic from London. In fact, it covers a large part of the East End, the historic center of the capital. For years (like most of the city) it also represented something else: a juicy market for those who wanted to invest in housing and achieve high returns. Not anymore. In 2025 about 30% Of the owners who got rid of their homes in that neighborhood (mostly apartments) had to do so for less money than they paid at the time. And it’s not just something that happens in Tower Hamlets. What has happened? That in London housing is no longer an infallible business. This is suggested at least by the latest study published by Hamptons, which reveals that in 2025 Londoners were the Britons most likely to lose money from the sale of their properties. Even more than its neighbors in the northeast of the United Kingdom, who have spent years leading the ranking. “Rising London house prices are no longer the safe bet they once seemed,” concludes the report, which is supported by the Property Registry. What do the figures say? that last year 14.8% of people Those who sold their home in London did so for less money than they originally paid. It may seem like a modest percentage, but it is striking for several reasons. To begin with because it is the largest in the entire United Kingdom. The national average is 8.7% and there are British regions where this indicator is much lower, such as Wales (6.2%), East Midlands (6.7%) or West Midlands (6.9%). London has effectively ousted Nort Easth, which had dominated the sales ranking with losses for the last decade. Is Tower Hamlets a unique case? No. Tower Hamlets is the London district where the trend is best appreciated, but is not the only one in which a significant proportion of homeowners (28.2%) have lost money by getting rid of their homes. In the City, 26.2% of sellers closed transactions in “red numbers”, in Kensington & Chelsea 22.4%, in Westminster 22.1% and in Hammersmith & Fulham 20.8%. Curiously, in the cheapest district of London, Barking & Dagenham, only that indicator is much lower: 5.3%. “In some cases, even homeowners who bought a decade ago risk getting back less than they paid, something almost unthinkable in 2015. And for many the sums are small,” the study insists. “In the coming years it is likely that more sellers will have missed out on the price boom that London experienced between 2012 and 2016, as they bought at the peak of the market.” Is there more data? Yes. The Hamptons report raises some interesting ideas. For example, most of the sales with losses (close to 90%) were carried out by apartments. If we talk about houses, the photo is somewhat different. Hamptons technicians recognize that in 2025 the average seller in London pocketed 172,500 pounds more than what they originally paid when purchasing their home, but they insist on the increase in sales at a loss: if in 2019 they represented 5.9%, in 2025 “red” operations already represented 14.8%. Is it the only report? No. Over recent months, more analyzes have been published showing that the London property market is not going through its best moment. There is talk of a price drop of 5.1% at the end of 2025 (which takes the market even further away from the 2022 data) and even from a sluggish prime housing market that will not rise until at least 2028. “In London, the growth of house prices is no longer a safe bet,” he explains to Financial Times Aneisha Beveridge, Hamptons manager. There is studies which show that prices are declining in half of London’s neighborhoods, leaving a “two-speed” market: that of the most expensive (and volatile) areas and the cheapest, which has demonstrated greater resilience. In December Bloomberg warned that homes worth more than two million run the risk of depreciating, losing almost 5% of their value in one year. What is the reason? The big question. When explaining the London trend the analysts they point out several factors. One of the main ones is the regulatory change, marked by the end of discounts to the purchase of housing and a greater penalty for the purchase of second homes and houses as investments. The authorities have also focused on the prime segment, rethinking the status nom-dom for large foreign fortunes and raising local taxes for the most expensive properties. Added to the above is the influence of Brexit, the exorbitant prices that London reached in 2022 or how difficult it is for families to access the market, partly because the cost of rent neutralizes the ability to save. The question that some are already made is whether London is an isolated case or should be understood as a canary in the mine for other European capitals. Image | Benjamin Davies (Unsplash) In Xataka | Housing is getting so expensive that in the United Kingdom there are already people opting for plan B: living on boats

The Canary Islands have been suffering total blackouts for years. Their salvation is a beast of engineering 1,145 meters under the sea

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A month ago, the destabilization of an old generator at the El Palmar thermal power plant in La Gomera caused a dramatic “cascade effect” that left more than 15,000 people without electricity, and without mobile coverage. This incident showed the extreme fragility from living in an isolated electrical system. However, the solution to this historical vulnerability no longer looks to the sky, but to the depths of the Atlantic. To overcome the abrupt volcanic orography and the extreme pressures of the Canary Islands seabed, engineering has had to design an “umbilical cord” unprecedented in the world, marking a before and after in the history of the archipelago. The end of isolation. In an effort to protect supply, Red Eléctrica de España (REE) has officially inaugurated the underwater interconnection between La Gomera and Tenerife. As confirmed by the REE itselfthe magnitude of the project translates into historic figures: an investment of 145 million euros for the cable laying, to which are added another 32 million destined for the two link substations located in Chío (Tenerife) and El Palmar (La Gomera). It is not a capricious work. How they collect local mediathe Canary Islands have suffered nine major “energy zeros” (total blackouts) since 2009. Tenerife and La Gomera have been among the islands hardest hit, so this infrastructure was born as a vital antidote to darkness. More than light. The implementation of this system completely alters the energy paradigm. As indicated ANDldiario.esboth islands cease to be solitary island systems and become a single network. From now on, if the rubber plant fails, Tenerife will inject energy instantly to avoid a blackout, and vice versa. But the scope of the work transcends mere security. As explained in detail in the REE statementcable is the key to decarbonization. La Gomera will now be able to generate much more renewable energy – mainly wind – than its population consumes. This green surplus will not be lost, but will travel along the seabed to Tenerife, drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels on both shores. The technical challenge: engineering to the limit. Connecting two volcanic islands separated by abyssal trenches is not an easy task. As emphasized The Daythe 36 kilometer length of the cable descends to 1,145 meters below sea level. This extreme depth makes it the deepest tripolar alternating current link on the entire planet, snatching the record that linked Crete and the Peloponnese since 2021. To withstand the weight and crushing pressure of the ocean at these levels, engineering had to reinvent itself. To do this, they had to discard the traditional use of steel and lead, opting instead for an ultralight synthetic material armor and an insulation based on ethylene and propylene rubber. Caring for the environment was also a priority. In order not to destroy coastal biodiversity or alter shallow volcanic beds, from The Confidential detail that it was used the “directed drilling” technique: an underground microtunnel that allows the cable to exit to the sea hundreds of meters from the beach. Likewise, the terrestrial substations use GIS (gas-insulated) technology to occupy the minimum possible space, and their buildings have been camouflaged imitating greenhouses and agricultural terraces to integrate into the landscape. Laying underwater bridges. The milestone of La Gomera and Tenerife is just the beginning. Future planning, as pointed out The Daycontemplates the colossal challenge of joining Fuerteventura with Gran Canaria, an even greater challenge given that the distance between the two exceeds 100 kilometers. Parallel to the electrical revolution, the Canary Islands are experiencing an unprecedented leap in their telecommunications. As these local media detailthere are more projects like BASE 6, promoted by the public company Canalink. This is a new 328 kilometer fiber optic cable with a budget of 19 million euros that will link Tenerife with El Hierro, landing through a drilling on Tamaduste beach. This data highway, with a capacity of 5 terabits per second, seeks to eradicate the digital divide on the most remote island, guaranteeing services such as telemedicine or online education. The invisible network. The Canary Islands not only look inward. As contextualized by OCTSI (Canary Telecommunications Observatory), the archipelago has been functioning for decades as a global strategic node, surrounded by historic fiber rings and international connections such as Telefónica’s PENCAN cables, currently in the process of renovation. However, this strategic position has its geopolitical edges. An extensive report from my colleague for Xataka focuses on network extension from Canalink to Africa. The Canary Islands are financing a cable to the Moroccan city of Tarfaya with European funds. The problem lies in the fact that Morocco intends to extend this infrastructure towards Western Sahara, a movement that clashes head-on with the rulings of the EU Court of Justice and that threatens to place Spain at the center of a complex diplomatic and legal conflict with the Polisario Front. Overcoming geographic isolation. At 1,145 meters under the scrutiny of the waves, where sunlight does not reach and the pressure is unbearable, the heartbeat that unites two islands now runs. The Canary Islands are managing to transform their greatest geographical weakness—fragmentation and isolation—into a true global showcase of technological innovation. Little by little, the old and noisy combustion engines give way to a future that will be inescapably green, and deeply interconnected. Image | OCTSI Xataka | The Canary Islands are going to lay a submarine cable to Morocco. If Morocco decides to extend it, Spain is going to have a big problem

The most surveilled place on the planet is not Ukraine or Taiwan. You are on a Canary Island with thousands of sensors pointing to a lethal threat

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For almost three months, between September and December 2021, the island of La Palma experienced the eruption longest and most destructive of its recent history. It happened when the Tajogait volcanoand opened the earth in the Cumbre Vieja dorsal and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, buried entire neighborhoods under lava and irreversibly altered the landscape and life of the island, inaugurating a new stage in which the end of the fire did not mean the end of the volcano. The town that did not stop breathing volcano. In Puerto Naos The lava never arrived, but the volcano did, seeping under streets, garages and foundations in the form of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that for years kept the neighborhood evacuated and turned daily life into a permanent risk equation. After the eruption of Tajogaite, the ground continued to exhale CO₂ of magmatic origin, reaching in some points extreme concentrationstypical of a lethal environment, forcing the closure of homes, businesses and beaches while residents learned that the danger no longer burned on the surface, but silently accumulated under their feet. Thousands of sensors and an experiment. They counted this week in a BBC report that has approached the enclave that the response transformed Puerto Naos into the most guarded place in the world in terms of CO₂, with more than 1,300 sensors distributed throughout homes, streets, streetlights, beaches, garages and hotels, connected to a continuous monitoring system capable of detecting any spike in real time. This deployment, driven by the CO₂ Alert projectallowed gas to stop being an unpredictable threat and become a measured, interpreted and managed phenomenon, making it possible the progressive return of the neighbors and the reopening of the urban center, always under the premise that normality here only exists as long as the data confirms that the air continues to be breathable. Living with alarms. For years, life in Puerto Naos was reorganized around the sensorswith garages permanently open for ventilation, closed basements, cordoned off areas and neighbors who learned to live with warning beeps as part of the soundscape. CO₂, denser than air, accumulated in the low points and it became visible like a diffuse waterfall in narrow courtyards, killing small animals along the way, corroding metals and remembering that the volcano was still active even though it was no longer expelling lava, molding not only the terrain but also psychology and decisions of those who refused to leave their home permanently. View of part of Puerto Naos Playa Chica, the pulse. In 2026 the problem is no longer general, but surgical: a small strip in Playa Chica and some specific garages where CO₂ continues to emerge straight from the underground through extremely porous terrain, one described by technicians as a “volcanic Gruyere cheese.” All the effort is now concentrated there, not so much to bring the town back to life (because it has already returned) but to close the last point where the volcano still sets the pace, remembering along the way that the eruption did not end when the fire ceased, but when the subsoil stopped breathing its last breath. Extract gas from the earth. The proven solution successfully by experts changes the traditional logic in these situations: instead of ventilating the buildings, the ground has been ventilated, capturing CO₂ underground and conveying it through pipes to controlled expulsion points near the sea, where the gas is quickly dispersed without danger. Not only that. Tests have shown drastic reductionsgoing from concentrations close to half a million ppm to safe levels. In other words, it has been confirmed that the method works and that the pending challenge is not a conceptual hypothesis, but a technical one, a fine adjustment to avoid load losses and guarantee that the system can operate in a stable and permanent way. Close the volcano. Puerto Naos it’s already openinhabited and functioning, but closing the volcano means turning this experiment into a complete a definitive infrastructureintegrate the extraction of CO₂ into the urban network and accept that the island will continue to be a “volcano” even when it seems calm. Perhaps for this reason, no one expects inaugurations or epic endings to what happened, just a silent moment in which Playa Chica leaves to be an exception and the air will once again be just that, demonstrating that on the island of La Palma the volcanic forces not only have shaped the earthbut also the way in which a community has learned to live, monitor and resist over it. Image | Eduardo RobainaHyperfinch In Xataka | Gran Canaria is increasingly at risk of blackouts. And he already has an idea on the table: imitate Russia in the Arctic In Xataka | The Canary Islands and Galicia have set off the Navy’s alarm bells. Russia’s ghost fleet has arrived in Spain with warships

The Canary Islands and Galicia have set off the Navy’s alarm bells. Russia’s ghost fleet has arrived in Spain with warships

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Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, above all, after the invasion large-scale ukrainian In 2022, Russia has been perfecting a form of confrontation that avoids direct clashes and moves in the shadows of international law: hybrid war. Sabotage, energy pressure, disinformation and opaque commercial fleets have become tools as strategic as tanks or missiles, and among them the called “ghost fleet”. Now everything indicates that they have found a new route: Spain. The “fleet” arrives from the south. At the end of January 2026, a Russian tanker sanctioned by the European Union was left adrift off the coast of Almería and was escorted by Spanish Maritime Rescue to a port in Morocco without being detained. He did it despite transporting more than 425,000 barrels of refined products of Russian origin. The episode, starring a ship integrated the ghost fleet (old ships, with frequent changes of name and flag and opaque structures of ownership) showed how Spain has become a key point of passage and incident management of a system designed to circumvent Western sanctions. Something happens. In the heart of the western Mediterranean, the Russian hybrid war was beginning to materialize not with missiles, but with timely breakdowns, gray areas of maritime law and routes connecting Russian ports with North Africa under the attentive, but limited, action of the European authorities. Morocco as a hinge, the Canary Islands as an entrance. A few days later, the arrival in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria of a oil tanker from Tangier set off alarms about a possible indirect entry of Russian fuel into Spain, using Morocco as an intermediate platform. Maritime security experts stressed that it was not an illegal operation in itself, but it was an unusual route which fits with the patterns of the ghost fleet, given that Morocco lacks sufficient refining capacity and has become a common destination for oil tankers linked to Russia. The Severomorsk Destroyer in 2023 The crux. The key, they insisted, is in the loading documentation, because the origin of the product remains Russian even if there are intermediate stops. In this context, the Canary Islands appear as a vulnerable link: a lightly guarded Exclusive Economic Zone, located in the transit axis of opaque oil tankers, which reinforces the idea that Spain offers the perfect combination of geography, infrastructure and control loopholes for this new phase of the Russian economic war. Silent pressure. Finally, and in parallel to these commercial and logistical movements, the most classic dimension of Russian naval power has ended up becoming visible in Spanish waters, forcing the Navy Spanish to intensify its surveillance operations. Within a week, Spanish units have followed the transit of several Russian vessels (including the destroyer Severomorsk and a mixed military-merchant convoy) from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Atlantic, with monitoring relays off the Galician coast and constant coordination with the command centers. Hybrid war. These missions, framed in the permanent surveillance of waters of national interest, show that the phenomenon is by no means isolated: while the ghost fleet operates on the economic and logistical level, the Russian naval presence reinforces the strategic pressure about key runners such as the Alboran Sea, Gibraltar and the Atlantic coast. Spain, the perfect route. The sum of these episodes draws a coherent pattern: the russia hybrid war has left the Baltic and the North Sea to settle in the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, and Spain has become one of your most effective routes. It seems clear that all those breakdowns managed without detention, indirect discharges via Morocco, fuels of dubious traceability entering through the Canary Islands and Russian military ships crossing runners strategic are part of the same logic of attrition, ambiguity and saturation that we had already seen in other parts of Europe. And as in those cases, it is not a frontal attack, but rather a constant pressure that exploits the gray areas of trade, energy and maritime security, now placing Spain at the center of a board where war is not declared, it is navigated. Image | US Navy, Mil.ru In Xataka | Russia’s ghost fleet has changed its business model. Oil has given way to a much bigger target: Europe In Xataka | For years Europe has wondered how to stop the Russian ghost fleet. Ukraine just showed you the way: with AI

There is a canary in the mine that is reminiscent of the subprime crisis: people in the US paying in installments for their supermarket purchases

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The United States faces a disturbing financial phenomenon that is beginning to spread throughout Europe: 91.5 million people finance their purchases with interest-free deferred payment services, and 25% of them use them for something as basic as filling the refrigerator. Defaults continue to grow: 34% in 2023 42% this year. The alarm does not come from pessimistic analysts, but fromNigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One and investor in Klarna. Someone who built an empire by understanding exactly how much financial stress the average American can endure before going bankrupt. Why is it important. In addition to the data itself, because the majority of these loans do not appear in traditional credit histories. Regulators call it “phantom debt.” A bank may consider someone who is drowning on five simultaneous microloans between Klarna, Affirm and PayPal solvent. The system flies blind. Morris sums it up: “If I’m a BNPL provider and I don’t look at credit agency data, I’m completely unaware that someone may have taken out ten of these loans last week.” And that is exactly what is happening. Between the lines. BNPL dangerously replicates pre-2008 logic: debt concentrated in vulnerable borrowers, packaged and sold to investors who believe they understand the risk. Elliott Advisors bought Klarna’s UK portfolio for $39 billion. KKR agreed to acquire up to $44 billion in BNPL debt from PayPal. The difference with the crisis subprime is that much of that debt remains invisible to the financial system. In Xataka The secret business behind your interest-free purchases: this is how El Corte Inglés turns your installments into financial gold The contrast. The Biden Administration attempted to regulate BNPL like credit cards. Trump backed down in May after pressure from the industry, revoking 67 rules. Days later, the Financial Protection Bureau published a surprisingly optimistic report: customers repaid their loans 98% of the time. The discrepancy with the 42% real delinquency rate reveals the problem: no one really knows what happens when someone manages several simultaneous accounts. Yes, but. By not reporting to the credit agencies, these companies prevent their customers from building a history to access cheaper credit. “Some companies don’t want that to happen because they don’t want the consumer to graduate,” Morris acknowledges. It’s part of the business model: keeping users trapped. And Europe is not immune. Klarna has been operating as a licensed bank since 2017 and has expanded its model to large Spanish shopping areas. The integration with Apple Pay and Google Pay makes it as simple as bringing your mobile phone closer to the dataphone. What started as a niche payment option is becoming integrated financial infrastructure. {“videoId”:”x9b3a8a”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”IF YOU SHARE A TENTH OF THE CHRISTMAS LOTTERY you have to KNOW THIS… 😓 #shorts”, “tag”:”loteria”, “duration”:”50″} turning point. Morris does not predict a collapse, but vigilance is urgently needed. In the United States, signs are accumulating: rising unemployment, end of student loan moratoriums, accelerated deregulation… The combination creates conditions where problems could escalate quickly. And when consumer debt becomes unsustainable, the pain spreads. Also even the investors who financed this ecosystem. In Xataka |The data that revives the ghosts of Spain and the real estate bubble: €8,000 of average debt for each tenant Featured image | appshunter.io (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news There is a canary in the mine that is reminiscent of the subprime crisis: people in the US paying in installments for their supermarket purchases was originally published in Xataka by Javier Lacort .

The largest telescope in the northern hemisphere is looking for a home. And the Canary Islands have just taken the lead

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Spain is getting closer to having in its territory the most powerful telescope on the entire planet, the Teinta Meter Telescope (TMT). Its location may finally be the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which for many years has been the emergency ‘plan B’, in case the original idea of ​​having it in the United States failed. And in the end, due to a large set of triggers, La Palma is gaining a lot of strength. A change of direction. He original use of the TMT was intended Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. But it is a plan that was paralyzed due to the rejection of the native communities, who consider this a sacred place. Although it is not only the ‘fault’ of the natives, but also of the cuts that the Trump administration has made intended for research and science in general. Given this situation, Spain has offered to host the project in La Palma as announced by the TMT International Observatory LLC on your website. In this case, he thanks the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities for the offer made of commit to invest 400 million euros to install this telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. The next steps are focused on developing together with the Ministry a “detailed roadmap towards the possible realization of the TMT at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory”, with the aim of this project moving forward at this location. The importance of La Palma. The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory already houses world-renowned facilities such as the Canary Islands Great Telescope (GTC), which is the largest optical and near-infrared telescope on the planet. In addition, it participates in new generation projects such as the Cherenkov telescopes, dedicated to observing high-energy gamma rays. And this is something that the Minister of Science herself, Diana Morant, wanted to remember, who through from your X account has celebrated this advance as the necessary step to turn “the Canarian sky into the main observatory in the northern hemisphere.” Why it is important. The TMT is not just any project: its construction involves some of the most influential scientific organizations on the planet, such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) or the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which represents more than 40 academic entities from around the world. Beyond this, we are also talking about the TMT being one of the three reference telescopes globally along with the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile or the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) being developed in the Atacama Desert. Its 30-meter diameter mirror, made up of 492 hexagonal segments, will make it a key tool for exploring exoplanets, black holes, dark matter and the formation of the first galaxies, with a resolution ten times higher than that of Hubble. Political impact. Beyond the astronomical potential, hosting the TMT would mean a leap in scale for Spain in its presence in international research, reinforcing the role of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) as a strategic partner in global scientific projects and attracting talent and technological investment. Images | Alin Corneliu In Xataka | Which telescope to buy to enjoy the nights and stars: 20 telescopes, binoculars, gadgets, accessories and more

It is the canary in the mine of the theater crisis

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The Spanish box office is in crisis. However, we pack the theaters to see re-releases of classics. Is one of the many contradictions that populate the current theaters, an industry on the tightrope during this season. The re-release of ‘Back to the Future’, if it succeeds at the box office (which it will) will serve to corroborate a series of possible solutions to this seemingly hopeless situation. And without the need for a Delorean. ‘Back to the Future’ returns. The film directed and co-written by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg in 1985 returns to theaters around the world for its 40th anniversary. Marty McFly’s journeys through the (apparently) happy fifties to get his parents to fall in love so he can be conceived retain the same charm as the day it premiered. For this reason, starting October 31, Universal is re-releasing the classic in theaters throughout Spain, which will allow more than one generation of viewers to discover it on the big screen. Why we still like it. First of all, It’s still a perfect adventure: Its alchemical mix of comedy and science fiction is absolutely canonical and has a script taken care of down to the smallest detail, full of nuances that, even after having been revised dozens of times, continue to provide surprises to the viewer. And above all, it is not a film that the film industry has worn out: after the original trilogy, which works compactly as a single narrative, there have been no sequels (more or less) no remakes (nor will there be any as long as their original managers can prevent it). Unlike most hits of the eighties, ‘Back to the Future’ remains untouched in a bubble that, significantly, prevents it from aging. The situation. This re-release arrives in a crisis situation at the Spanish box office. The domination of streaming has led us to a peculiar and paradoxical panorama: we watch more movies than ever, we go to the movies less than ever. According to the Statistical Yearbook According to the SGAE, 60.7% of the Spanish population watches at least one movie a week, while a significant 15% watch it daily. Howeverand here comes the dark side of the issue, in 2024 attendance fell 5% compared to 2023, with 71 million viewers and 477 million euros in income, 2.2% less than the previous year, stagnating at pre-pandemic figures. The platforms have transformed traditional habitsoffering the possibility of watching movies and series on multiple devices (TV, computer, mobile), at any time and place, apart from being much more economical. We need events. These are signs that point to a “crisis of spaces”: people do not want to stop watching movies, but rather turn a visit to the cinema into something special. That is why re-releases of classics and the return to the big screen of all kinds of hits from the past work so well. For example, this past summer we had the 50th anniversary re-release of ‘Shark‘, a film that worked wonderfully at the US box office and also in Spanish. The beautiful nostalgia. Obviously, no matter how much you have managed to escape from fashions and trends of the mainstream of Hollywood and not giving in to sequels or remakes, the re-release of ‘Back to the Future’ is the result of another of the trends that mark the agenda of international cinema: nostalgia. It is thanks to her that these cinema re-releases are working just as well or even better than conventional releases: in 2022 we had the 50th anniversary of ‘The Godfather’in 2018 a restored version of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the classic installments of ‘Star Wars’ return again and again to theaters, in the same way that ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Lord of the Rings’ do… Good proof that venues need to find new formulas. And perhaps turning to classics and revivals is one that also needs to be reviewed before it, like the rest of the box office, ends up singed. In Xataka | The remake of ‘Agárralo como puede’ has performed very well at the box office. Excellent news for an almost dead genre: comedy

We know that the price of housing in the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands is skyrocketing because neither the British nor the Germans can afford it.

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The price of housing in highly stressed tourist areas, such as the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands, has reached levels so high that neither the British nor the Germans, traditionally the most active foreign buyers and wealthy people on the islands, can afford to continue acquiring properties at the rate of previous years. As and how they collected in Express this trend well supported by the latest data of the General Council of Notaries, in which a very relevant change can be seen in the Spanish real estate market, especially on the islands, where international demand has always been noted as part of the problem. Fewer houses are sold. According to the log data Notaries, during the first half of 2025, the Balearic and Canary Islands have experienced a real turnaround in the home buying and selling market. The percentage of home sales by foreigners fell by 7.7% in the Canary Islands and 6.8% in the Balearic Islands during the first half of 2025. In the same period, only two territories showed a behavior similar to the islands: Valencia, which fell by 3.6% and Navarra, which reduced the number of purchase and sale operations with foreigners by 3.7%. The reason: too expensive housing. It is enough to continue reviewing the data provided by the College of Notaries to find one of the reasons that could have caused this. drop in trading volume: prices have skyrocketed. The figures show how the traditional appeal for British and German buyers is declining. The data reveal that the average price paid by foreigners in purchase and sale operations in Spain as a whole was 2,417 euros per square meter, which represents an increase of 7.6% compared to the price in 2024. Non-resident foreigners continue to pay higher amounts for their homes (€3,126/m2) than resident foreigners (€1,912/m2) and nationals (1,809 €/m2). In the Canary Islands the average price rose by 14.1%, far exceeding the national average, while in the Balearic Islands the average increase was up to 9% compared to 2024. Source: General Council of Notaries Foreigners continue buying in Spain. The data indicate that the volume of foreign sales operations in Spain has not decreased in the territory as a whole, where the total number of homes bought by foreigners increased 2% compared to last year, reaching 71,155 operations. This variation in the volume of operations on the islands, together with the increase in their price, leads us to suspect that price pressure is differentially affecting the most touristic and stressed areas, especially those that, as in the case of the islandsthe options to expand the surface area for residential housing are very limited. That is to say, it is not that foreigners are buying less, but that they are doing so in less tense and with more reasonable prices. Who buys in Spain? Despite the drop in sales from the islands, the British continue to lead the list of foreign buyers in Spain, with 5,731 registered transactions, followed by Moroccans (5,654 transactions) and Germans (4,756 purchases and sales). However, operations carried out by foreigners represented 19.3% of total sales, a slightly lower proportion than that registered in 2024 with 20.3%. This loss of prominence is felt above all in the islands, where the British and Germans clearly dominated the statistics. The end of the “Golden Visa”. Besides, the advertisement of the elimination of the so-called golden visas or “Golden Visa”“, which allowed you to obtain residency in Spain in exchange for investing a certain amount of money in real estate, has also conditioned the decline in demand. In the first six months of 2025, foreign residents accounted for 60.9% of the purchases made, which represents 6.4% more than the previous year. On the other hand, non-resident foreigners who were affected by the elimination of the ‘Golden Visa’ and had to assume new tax limits, they reduced their purchases by 4.1%. In Xataka | Hoteliers dream of hanging the sign full in 2025. The rent that their employees must pay is their worst nightmare Image | Unsplash (Boris Busorgin)

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