Spanish

Spanish cities are full of a tree that litters everything with flowers and fruits. They have a reason to be there

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If during these weeks of summer you have walked through the streets of your city, it is very likely that you have stepped on a dense carpet of small creamy white flowers. The person responsible for this summer floral rain is an old acquaintance of the urban trees that we popularly know as “Japanese acacia” and scientifically as Styphnolobium japonicum. Its usefulness. If you wonder why the city councils of cities like Zaragoza, Barcelona or Murcia insist on planting this species on paved avenues, the answer It is in its extraordinary adaptive physiology. Something that is supported by the technical sheets that classify it as a species highly tolerant to urban pollution. It is a tree that successfully withstands traffic pollutionheat islands, drought and poor or highly compacted soils. Added to this is its ability to provide dense shade during the harshest months of the year, making it an ideal candidate for road alignment design. It’s not perfect. The only negative point that this tree may have, despite the long list of advantages, is the annoyance that the massive drop of its flowers and later of its fleshy fruits can cause in pedestrian areas. This is something that can end up being quite annoying and making cities very dirty, which is why it requires good maintenance and cleaning. Late flowering. While most urban trees bloom in spring, the Styphnolobium japonicum Save your energy for the summer. Specifically, flowering occurs in the hottest months, between June and August. Its small papilionaceous flowers not only create that characteristic “carpet” impression on the ground, but are highly melliferous. For weeks, the canopy of these trees becomes a hotbed of bees and other pollinators, fulfilling a vital ecological function in the urban ecosystem during a time when other sources of nectar are scarce. Its fruits, strangled legumes reminiscent of a pearl necklace, remain hanging on the branches for a long time, extending their ornamental value well into winter. The identity crisis. One of the great myths around this tree is in its popular name because it is not an acacia. But around his Japanese origin, his epithet “japonicum“was historically misleading, as its native range is not found in Japan, but in the central and southern regions of China. It was introduced to Europe and East Asia much later, where it became greatly popular due to its biological characteristics. Its toxicity. In the field of ethnobotany and traditional Asian medicine, various parts of this tree are have attributed medicinal propertiesand the reality is that it has been seen to have compounds with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antibacterial properties. But the problem is that some parts of the tree, such as the raw fruit, are toxic, so their management should be left to the pharmaceutical industry and moving away from home remedies. Images | Bianka Becsi In Xataka | In the 19th century it was planted in parks for its beauty: today this tree is one of the trees that breaks the most pipes and sidewalks in Spain

The Spanish anthem has no lyrics, so we have sung another one that has nothing to do with football: Nino Bravo’s

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The Spanish anthem or Marcha Real is a rarity: it does not have official lyrics (although there are those who have tried to compose it, from José María Pemán to Sabina or Marta Sánchez), which gives it a solemn aura, but prevents the participation of the masses in festive environments. Like when you win a Soccer World Cup, except that people become helpless “lo lo lo lo.” However, the fans I needed a letter for chant and celebrate the champions and found it within a melodic 1972 song milestone that doesn’t mention football once. When did it start? ‘A kiss and a flower’ by Nino Bravo already played in stadiums in the United States and Mexico throughout the tournament, and ended chanted in unison by players and fans after the whistle that put an end to the same. At the airport, hours later, the public address system made it sound while relatives from both teams shared a terminal on the way home. The verse that circulated the most on networks was the one that opens the song: “When parting, a kiss and a flower, an ‘I love you’, a caress and goodbye.” The original. It was composed by José Luis Armenteros and Pablo Herrero in 1972, with arrangements by Maryní Callejo, and it was number one on Los 40 Principales that same year, four weeks in a row. Its interpreter, Luis Manuel Ferri Llopis, better known as Nino Bravo, died in a traffic accident in 1973, when he was only 28 years old. This video clip that was filmed in the Balearic Islands For the Ministry of Information and Tourism it is the only color material that is preserved from him. Before this song, Nino Bravo had already triumphed outside of Spain: between 1969 and 1970 he recorded some sixty songs and his voice especially resonated in Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile and Colombia, markets where he shared the bill with Raphael without the divo overshadowing him in the slightest. That his repertoire (especially this one and ‘Libre’) is still alive half a century later in the stands and the streets is proof of how it has deeply permeated Spanish popular culture. What the lyrics are really talking about. The more extended reading He links it to the economic emigration of Franco’s regime: the years in which thousands of young people left “with the cardboard suitcase” for Germany, Switzerland or France in search of a salary that they could not find here (“I will leave my land for you, I will leave my fields and I will go, far from here”). That is why the song serves today, far from Spain, as an anthem of another exodus: in Cuba it is still associated with those who have had to leave the island in recent decades. The long relationship with football. In fact, Nino Bravo’s melody has been around for decades sneaking into Latin American standsalthough with the lyrics completely replaced. The fans of Barcelona SC, in Ecuador, adapted it to sing about his yellow uniform; Colombian Deportivo Cali did something similarand there is also a version for Independiente Medellín. In those cases the lyrics vary to encourage the team and the fans and launch the corresponding jabs at the rival. The Spanish case is special: there is no new or modified letter. The original is sung, which promises a return as the only very slight and common link with the circumstances of the competition. And be careful, the original letter does not distinguish flags. In fact, a curious phenomenon has occurred with it: despite its international significance, it has been chanted en bloc among Spanish players and fans because it has been judged in an intuitive and unspoken way that it is a genuinely Spanish anthem and that it represents us. Like the sun every morning. In Xataka | Argentina is clear that Argentina had to give away Argentina’s fourth World Cup. And no one in Argentina is very clear why.

the alternatives to asphalt that Spanish cities already use

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With the temperatures skyrocketing and the Aemet warning of new heat waves Above 40 degrees in much of Spain, it is clear that, beyond active cooling solutions such as fans and air conditioners, cities must also plan to implement urban solutions that dissipate heat in buildings and streets. In this article we wanted to highlight one of the measures that we have been using for decades. It is a type of pavement that effectively reduces the temperature of the streets thanks to its porosity. But it is not the only type of pavement that fulfills the mission of reducing temperatures (nor the only remedy that cities have). Below these lines we tell you the details. The thing is about pavements. There are two large families of “cold pavements”. The first are the permeable or porous pavements. These are surfaces with holes connected to each other that allow rainwater to pass into the ground instead of diverting it directly to the sewers. This retained water evaporates little by little and cools the environment, in addition to reducing flash floods. The second family are reflective pavements or high solar reflectance (also known as “cool pavements”), which do not seek to filter water, but rather return a greater part of the solar radiation they receive to the atmosphere, instead of absorbing and storing it as conventional black asphalt does. A type of porous pavement. Image: Pavipor Heat trapped in the streets. Dark asphalt and concrete absorb much of the sun’s radiation during the day and slowly release it at night, preventing cities from cooling even when the sun goes down. This phenomenon, known as urban heat islandcauses large cities to register noticeably higher temperatures than in rural areas, especially at night. And of course, with episodes of extreme heat becoming more frequent, any measure that lowers the street temperature by a few degrees already helps a lot. Examples. The most recent case is that of Barcelona. The City Council, with technical support from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), approved last year a new reflective agglomerate on a section of Martí i Franquès street, in the Les Corts district, directly comparing it with a section of conventional black asphalt to measure the real temperature difference between both materials. As explained by the City Council itself, this pavement has the capacity to reflect a greater part of solar radiation than traditional asphalt, which helps reduce both surface heating and the temperature of the environment. Barcelona installing a type of reflective pavement. Image: Barcelona City Council The test is part of the municipal Climate Plan, and is not the first of its kind, since according to collect El Diario, before testing with the pavement, Barcelona had already launched a pilot plan to paint the roofs of several buildings white and with reflective pigments, including a school in the Les Corts district. Seville, one of the cities hardest hit by heat waves in Spain, has also proposed similar solutions. And in recent years, the City Council has been adding to its planning the massive planting of shade trees, replacement of dark pavements with lighter materials in various parts of the city, awnings on commercial streets, sustainable drainage and a network of “climate shelters” distributed throughout the neighborhoods to give respite to the population during heat peaks. These types of measures are increasingly applied on Spanish streets, especially in those large cities in the country that become an oven when summer arrives. It doesn’t work the same everywhere. A recent study by the University of Granada, has analyzed the thermal behavior of the eight Andalusian capitals and has come to the conclusion that there is no single solution to cool a city. According to the project researchers, in Seville and Malaga the factor that weighs the most is the albedo of the materials, that is, their ability to reflect solar radiation, while in Córdoba the building density and the waterproofing of the soil have more influence, and in Granada the key is in the urban geometry and how open the streets are to the sky. The same study also recalls that dense canopy trees continue to be, by themselves, one of the most effective tools, since they can lower the temperature between 3 and 5 degrees in parks where it is well designed. It is clear that reflective or porous pavement helps, but they work more as a complement to other urban solutions. In Xataka | Madrid is going to open a tunnel that monitors traffic with AI in real time: this is how the new Castellana subway will work

Europe wants to put an end to the particular Iberian exception of the Spanish train. And Spain has a clear answer: no.

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There are investments and investments. More or less necessary. More or less large. But there are also more or less viable ones. And, of course, the Ministry of Transport considers that the European Commission’s proposal to change all roads from Iberian gauge to international gauge is anything but viable. And they have a good reason: 30,000 million euros. What does Europe want? In October 2025, The European Commission presented its project to cement, once and for all, the connection between Madrid and Lisbon with high-speed trains. After many delays, if the plans are fulfilled and both cities end up being united in 2030 with a single train, high speed will arrive on this line 20 years late. In the writing The bases that the routes must follow are reflected and there is an important paragraph in them: With the ambition to fully integrate the Lisbon–Madrid high-speed rail connection into the broader high-speed network in Spain and France, adopting the European standard nominal gauge of 1,435 mm is a key step. In this way, the competitiveness of long-distance passenger traffic will be strengthened. By connecting Portugal and Spain, and extending to France, the Lisbon–Madrid high-speed rail connection has a clear cross-border and Union dimension In it it is clear that we are talking about the Madrid-Lisbon line but on the occasion of this text, public entities must study the economic viability of migrating the railway network to the international gauge and definitively abandoning the Iberian gauge. The answer. No. Simple and concise. According to The Countrya medium that claims to have had access to internal documents of the Ministry of Transportation, the Government’s response to this migration is a resounding “no.” The reasons are as simple as that it would take 30 years of works and an investment of 30,000 million euros to reverse the Iberian exceptionalism of the Spanish and Portuguese train. In the documents that Spain will present to Brussels, it is specified that the matter is not viable in its entirety or in part since the possibility of installing “third threads or lanes to achieve mixed widths” was contemplated, they explain in the medium. No, no and no. They explain in The Country that the Ministry of Transportation rejects all the options that have been put on the table: Changing exclusively the lines of the European corridors: it would leave, according to Transport, more than 5,000 km of the network isolated. Implement a mixed width with third rails or threads: discarded due to the complexity of the work and the high maintenance cost Change all Iberian gauge roads: Transport considers it unapproachable although it has been the most studied option because it is ideal. What is this track width? Spain, since the 19th century it has lived in an Iberian exceptionality next to Portugal. Throughout this century, the railway was gaining followers all over the world. During its expansion, the lines were built with different track widths, taking into account the particularities of the terrain. In Europe, the number of tracks built with a width of 1,435 mm multiplied and ended up becoming established. Everything above it is considered “wide gauge” and below it as “narrow gauge” because those 1,435 mm were accepted as the standard. This is how the international gauge was born. In Spain, however, we chose to build our railway network on a track gauge of 1,672 millimeters, defended by three engineers who were entrusted with the task of projecting the future of the Spanish train. They argued that a wider track width allowed the use of more powerful locomotives and that this was essential in a mountainous country like ours. And the consequences? The consequences were immediate. Already in the middle of the 19th century From Portugal they asked Spain by letter to desist from building their roads with this new gauge because they would be isolated from Europe. And the problem, evidently, was greater for Portugal, which was dragged along by the Spanish decision. Spain, as you imagine, did not give up and now lives between three gauges of road: the international one (for about 4,000 km of high speed), the Iberian one (for 13,000 km of Cercanías) and the metric width (1,210 km for especially mountainous terrain). This is a problem for connectivity between tracks because trains cannot jump from one to another, except for the Talgo Avril. And it’s an advantage. At least for Renfe. And Renfe can take advantage of this particularity in some very specific points on the Peninsula. For example, in Madrid-Galicia, international gauge and Iberian gauge are used, already in the Galician part. Only Renfe has trains that can jump from one track gauge to another, so competition is eliminated. And the same will happen in Portugal. The connection between Madrid and Lisbon is being built on an international gauge but the Portuguese high-speed line between Lisbon and Porto will operate on an Iberian gauge. This leaves Renfe as the only company that could operate a Madrid-Porto train passing through Lisbon without the need to transfer. Now it is better understood why Renfe will invest in converting the Avrils fixed gauge on variable gauge trains and why Transportes believes that Portugal is a great market opportunity. Photo | Falk2 In Xataka | Renfe offers its juiciest contract: 4,000 million euros to buy trains. And everything indicates that he will not stay in Spain

If France loses against Spain, at least it can console itself by recovering Spanish territory in the Basque Country. Will do it in 16 days

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If France loses against Spain in the World Cup semi-finalsin just 16 days you will have a little consolation. Yes, on August 1 it will recover, in a completely peaceful and automatic manner, the administration of a Spanish territory in the heart of the Basque Country. It will not be a sporting revenge or a conquest, but rather the replacement planned for more than a century and a half of Pheasant Islanda tiny islet that has become one of the most unusual symbols of peace in Europe. A curious “revenge”. While Spain and France once again measure their strength on the playing field, there is a place where the rivalry between both countries is resolved in a way much less common. If the French are defeated, the calendar reserves them a curious compensation: next August 1 they will take over for six months the administration of Pheasant Island, an islet located in the Bidasoa River, between Irun and Hendaye. In essence, it does not change ownership or nationality in the strict sense, but it does authority changes who manages it, in a ritual that has been repeated every year with almost clockwork precision since the 19th century. As small as it is enormous in symbolism. Pheasant Island is barely between 130 and 200 meters long and its surface changes slightly depending on the riverbed, oscillating between about 2,000 and 6,800 square meters. It is completely uninhabited, closed to the public almost all year round and does not even house pheasants, despite what its name indicates. However, its historical importance is immense because for centuries it was the setting chosen to resolve some of the most delicate diplomatic episodes between the Spanish and French crowns. Meeting of Louis XIV and Philip IV on Pheasant Island in 1660 (Meeting of the two kings on Pheasant Island, painting by Jacques Laumosnier) The islet that ended a war. Long before becoming a shared territory, the island was already considered an neutral ground. There the exchange of King Francis I of France for his children took place in 1526 after the battle of pavia and, decades later, the exchange of princesses between both monarchies. But the decisive episode came in 1659, when Spain and France negotiated and signed in that same place. the Treaty of the Pyreneesthe agreement that ended more than two decades of war and established much of the border that both countries continue to share today. A year later, the island also hosted the wedding between Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Austria, daughter of Philip IV, definitively becoming a symbol of reconciliation. In 1861, the two neighboring countries erected a monument on the island in commemoration of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The solution was to share it forever. That symbolic value ended up legally crystallizing almost two centuries later. The Treaty of Bayonne of 1856 established that the island would belong “individually” to both countries, giving rise to what is usually considered the smallest condo of the world. Since then, Spain administers the islet between February 1 and July 31, while France does the same between August 1 and January 31. The handover is not simply administrative: authorities from both countries celebrate an official ceremony in which the transfer is formalized, maintaining a tradition that has been carried out without interruptions for more than 160 years. There are others, but none of them work like that. The concept of international condominium is not exclusive to Pheasant Island. There are other territories jointly administered, such as some river areas between Germany and Luxembourg, the Gulf of Fonseca shared by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Brcko district in Bosnia and Herzegovina or even Antarctica under the Antarctic Treaty. However, none of them reproduces a system as striking as that of Bidasoa: a strict alternation every six months, ceremonial and perfectly regulated, in which management passes from one country to the other without disputes, claims or diplomatic tensions. An example of cooperation. The idyllic image of the islet contrasts with some of the current problems on the Franco-Spanish border. In recent years the Bidasoa River has become at a passing point for numerous migrants trying to reach France, and several of them have lost their lives trying to cross its waters. This reality reminds us that the border continues to be a sensitive spacealthough precisely for this reason Pheasant Island retains an even greater value: it demonstrates that a territory born of a war can be transformed, over generations, into a mechanism of peaceful cooperation. The biggest victory between the two was never played in a stadium. Semifinals, finals and sports rivalries always end with a winner and a loser. Pheasant Island represents just the opposite. It was born from one of the great European conflicts of the 17th century, but today it works thanks to an agreement that neither of the two countries questions and that is renewed twice a year with absolute normality. Therefore, if France ends up falling today against Spain, it will always be able to say that the defeat was short-lived: Just sixteen days later you will once again administer a small piece of territory located between both countries, the same place where centuries ago they decided that the best way to end a war was to learn to share the map. Image | ZaratemanJacques Laumosnier, Iñaki LL In Xataka | Spain does not wait for France: it is studying a huge submarine cable with distant Ireland to stop being an energy island In Xataka | It’s in France and the sea swallows it twice a day: this is the road where you risk your car if you don’t look at the clock

The OECD has found a burden in the Spanish labor market: we do not earn enough

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It doesn’t fail. Every time I go shopping at the supermarket I come across someone who complains about the price of fruit, of the eggs or the unattainable that the salmon has set for the little that the salary rises of the humble workers. That buzz now has international support. The report has just been published ‘OECD Employment Outlook 2026’ which analyzes the labor market of the member countries and, among praising the Spanish labor market, has left us with a small barb: low salaries continue to be Spain’s weak point. A report that puts figures to the discomfort. The Paris-based organization analyzes the occupational health of the more than 40 member countries every year. In 2026, the organization recognizes important advances in the Spanish labor market: more employment, less temporalitya stoppage that goes down little by little. But when it comes to the salaries section, the tone changes. According to OECD data, real wages, after inflation, remain 2% below where they were at the beginning of 2021, just before prices soared. That is, in terms of purchasing power, salaries are worse than five years ago. This percentage places Spain among the three countries with the greatest drop in purchasing power since the pandemic, only behind Italy and Australia. Much of Europe has already recovered its purchasing power after the post-pandemic downturn, but Spain continues to lag behind. The minimum wage rises, the rest stagnates. It is worth stopping to analyze salaries in Spain because during the last five years not all salaries have evolved the same. The minimum wage has been going up for years by decree and this 2026 reached the 1,221 euros per month3.1% more than last year. Since 2018 it has grown more than 60%. This salary increase, the only one that is in the hands of the Government, has protected those who earn the least. The problem is what happens above that mandatory minimum that remains in the hands of companies. While the minimum has been advancing, the average salary has barely movedand the distance between the two narrows, causing more and more employees to approach that income floor, so that an employee with several years of experience can charge just a little more than a young man in his first job. Increase in real wages according to the OECD. Spain in the tail group It’s math. The INE data confirm that the labor cost per worker rose 4.9% in the first quarter of 2026. However, if this figure is crossed with an inflation that is around 3%, the real margin of improvement that remains is small, and for a large part of the workforce, the increase in their purchasing power is almost non-existent. “Although real wages grew by 2% during the last year, they are still 2% below their level in the first quarter of 2021, which places Spain among the OECD economies where they have fallen the most since the Pandemic,” the international organization warns, highlighting Spain’s wage stagnation. Why don’t salaries start? The OECD points to an old acquaintance to justify this stagnation: productivity. Spain has hardly improved its productivity figures for a decade and that limits how much a salary can rise without the company losing margin. “Given that labor productivity growth has stagnated over the last decade, and in a context of renewed short-term inflationary pressures, real wages are anticipated not to rebound throughout 2026 and 2027,” the OECD report indicates. The positive side is that, although the situation has stagnated in recent years, Spanish companies have become less reactive to the ups and downs of the economy. The proportion of companies that have laid off their employees despite changes in the economy has increased from 8.9% at the end of 2019 to 4.3% in the first quarter of 2026. The organization attributes this decline to the application of the labor reform in 2022. “The reform has driven greater recourse to permanent contracts: the proportion of workers with temporary contracts fell from 24.8% in the first quarter of 2022 to 14.8% in the first quarter of 2026, although it is still higher than that of most OECD countries,” the report states. Unemployment, the wound that does not close. The other burden that the OECD points out in the Spanish labor market is more than well known, but no less serious. Spain remains the second country with the highest unemployment rate of the entire OECD, more than double the average and only behind Finland. According to the unemployment data of the Ministry of Labor, in May it fell to 10.3%, reaching 2007 levels. It is an improvement, yes, but from a very high starting point. Behind that figure there is also a factor of geographical inequality. The difference between the regions with the most and the least unemployment reaches 15.5 points, well above the OECD average. Looking for work in Melilla is not the same as in the Basque Country, and that gap It is also transferred to the income of each household, according to the report itself. In Xataka | Working does not get you out of poverty: three out of four workers have not improved their purchasing power in two years Image | Unsplash (Ru Dur, Mitchell Luo)

Spanish oil is changing radically and we are only now beginning to realize it

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There was a time when some olive oil jugs came with an anti-theft alarm. Those were the years in which the liter was close to ten euros and analysts wondered if the EVOO culture was dead. Traditional producers were drowning between meager production and falling demand. That was all two years ago. Now things have changed. Now prices are at rock bottom and, as a consequence, more than 75% of the Spanish olive grove, according to the association of olive municipalities, already produces below costs. The data is accurate; the producers are still drowning; The panorama is desolate. However, none of this means what it seems. The 75% figure. The assembly of the AEMO (Spanish Association of Municipalities of the Olivo) met in Adamuz and advanced its cost study for 2026. According to its calculations, the price at origin is 3.51 euros and that means that More than 75% of the olive growing area is already producing at a loss or at the limit of profitability. It makes sense. The AEMO does a more subtle job than we usually see and elaborates not “a cost” but sevenone for each cultivation system. As soon as we start to think in those terms, the olive grove stops being a ‘sea of ​​olive trees’ and becomes a very complex agro-industrial system. To give us an idea, the costs of the traditional mountain olive grove are about 5.31 euros per kilo, while the irrigated hedge is 3.07. Thus, with the average price of 3.51 euros, the hedge gains money and the traditional mountain hedge loses almost two euros. The hunger games. To be fair, we have to recognize that the AEMO is ‘part’ in this discussion (it defends the traditional olive grove) and, furthermore, has not yet published the entire report. However, the figures fit with what we already knew: no matter what happens in the olive oil market, the result is always the same: the irrigated olive grove wins. This is so clear that there is a whole mad race for make all hectares irrigated that they can (at all costs at a social, economic and environmental level). The current situation… It has to do, above all, with excess oil: after some bad seasons, we have gone from around 666,000 tons in 2022/23 to around 1.4 million in the last two campaigns. As there is a type of olive tree that can continue to be profitable at very low prices, there are no real incentives to contain the supply and that exposes a good part of the industry to having to assume the losses to stay alive for another season. And why should we care about olive farmers now? In our country (and without going into speculation about how good or bad the sector is), the olive grove has a key role in the economic, labor and industrial structure of Empty Spain. It is a discreet and underappreciated role; but that undoubtedly forms part of the basal structure of a good part of the country. It is not an accident that the association that is moving this is of municipalities: the traditional olive grove is an issue of great territorial importance. Because we must not be fooled. We talk about surface, not production. The irrigated olive grove is much more productive and is increasingly important. What we are seeing is a change of model within the sector and, linked to that, we are beginning to see the consequences it will have in the medium term. Spiler: they will not be good for most of olive-growing Spain. Image | Maximo Lopez In Xataka | Spain faces its greatest agricultural challenge of the century: converting 1,901,529 hectares of olive groves into irrigation before it is too late

A job offer without salary is a half offer. These Spanish technology companies are the exception

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Let me put you in a situation: you are looking for a job and you find an offer that broadly appeals to you, so you apply. Of course, the offer does not say how much you are going to charge, but you give it a chance. Your CV passes the first filter and you end up in some personal interview where they ask you the tricky question of “How much do you expect to earn?” and after dodging the bullet using Bill Gates trickthey end up revealing a salary range that doesn’t fit you. What a waste of time. Unfortunately, it has happened to (almost) everyone. Fewer companies do this transparency exercise than they should, but we have good news: in the absence of the Spanish government transposing the European pay transparency law to remedy it (it is late: the deadline expired on June 7), there is a list of technological employment companies that operate in Spain that do say how much they pay in their job offers. The pasta list. The Getmanfred platform created and maintains This public list on GitHub which Borja Pérez, Rebeca Méndez and Raúl Cotrina are in charge of reviewing and updating by hand by looking at the employment portals of each respective company: if the salary appears, they add to this list. There are more than fifty corporations, from Spanish startups like TaxDown or Landbot to large international companies like GitLab or DuckDuckGo, including Newtral, Mercadona Tech or PcComponentes. Not all of them are there, but they are all that are and if yours does not appear, you can always write to them to remedy it. Why it is important. Because information is power: when you don’t know how much a company pays, you’re at a disadvantage from the start. Furthermore, in general we tend to underestimate the salaries earned in other companies in the sector and this happens even more in low-paying jobs, according to this MIT study. Knowing the conditions from the beginning saves time, energy and disappointment. Salary opacity has a real social cost: in the Spanish state, women earn on average 4,781 euros less per year than men, a gap of 15.74% according to the INE with data from 2023. That salaries are a secret makes it much more difficult to detect and correct these inequalities. Context. Europe has been trying to resolve this by law for years. The Directive 2023/970 of the European Parliament approved in 2023 obliges companies to publish salary information and take corrective measures if their gender gap exceeds 5%. Spain has a previous rule, the Royal Decree 902/2020which required internal records, but the new directive goes much further. The interesting thing about Getmanfred’s project is that it includes the voluntary movement: companies that are ahead of mandatory requirements precisely because transparency (and the conditions) constitute an advantage for attracting talent. In detail. The repository is simple: a table with names and a link to their job portal: there is no automation or data scraping, but rather anyone can contribute to updating the list. In the table, the majority are tech with a remote work culture and Anglo-Saxon origin and just as important as those that are there are those that are not: large Spanish corporations are missing, since there is no trace of banks or traditional consulting firms. Yes, but. That a company makes public the salary of an offer could make one think that it is because it is an incentive, but this is not always the case. Come on, you are going to find some miserable salaries that show a reality: that of low salaries in Spain. On the other hand, there are “transparencies” that are of little use: if the range is “between 30,000 and 70,000 euros”, the information is not very valuable. Likewise, this directory also does not say anything about what happens within these companies: if they pay men and women the same, if the ranges they publish correspond to what they really offer or what criteria there are to move within the published range. In Xataka | If the question is in which country in the world the salary is highest, this graph has the answer: in Spain we could do worse In Xataka | The best paid jobs in Spain in 2026: from 56,000 euros for a doctor to 250,000 for directing private banking Cover | Ron Lach and Atlantic Ambience and Sora Shimazaki

The fourth highest-grossing Spanish film in history lands on Netflix full of political incorrectness

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28 years ago, Santiago Segura shot the first film in the highest-grossing saga in the history of Spanish cinema in eight weeks and with 1.7 million euros. Now, the sixth part of the series, ‘Torrente President’lands on Netflix with a history of records that speaks for itself: the best first weekend of a Spanish film in the last 15 years, more than 3.7 million spectators in cinemas, the fourth highest grossing of a Spanish film of all time, and a budget that Segura estimated at just under six million euros. Twelve years after ‘Torrente 5: Operation Eurovegas’, José Luis Torrente, the former fascist and Atleti police officer, returns, always convinced that Spain is going through its most critical moment and that only he can save national dignity. This time he discovers that politics may be his best opportunity to thrive and after a series of entanglements he ends up leading the populist NOX party thanks to his unmistakable and demagogic style, so similar to current political reality. It was clear that Spain was thirsty for Torrente, and Segura, who can be accused of many things but not of not having a commercial nose, has been able to take advantage of a very specific social moment to return Torrente to the billboards. Right now, ‘Torrente, Presidente’ has already grossed more than half of all Spanish cinema released in 2026, and will surely become one of the most viewed films of the moment on Netflix, which helped co-finance the production and which has the rest of the saga exclusively in its catalog. The notable thing about all this is that ‘Torrente Presidente’ is not a rarity for Segura’s commercial career. Beyond the fact that the series has already raised more than one hundred million euros, Bowfinger International Pictures is behind the film, the production company directed by Segura together with María Luisa Gutiérrez. The company has more than forty titles and a history that includes ‘The Infiltrator’ (Goya for Best Film) and the sagas ‘Padre no hay más que uno’ and ‘La familia Benetón’. Between 2025 and 2026, its productions accounted for 30% of the Spanish box office. And between its traditional production agreement with Atresmedia and now the entry of Netflix into the company’s finances, the production company has a muscle with little to envy of much larger traditional production companies. In Xataka | Today on Disney+, the film that, despite exceeding one billion at the box office, has left the continuity of its franchise up in the air

The most touristic enclave in Italy has two news programs left. It is quite a warning for the half of the Spanish coast

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The advance of climate change is leaving more or less obvious signs that range from the maturation of fruit trees earlier to intense heat waves even before summer arrives like the one we are livingbut the future is bleak: more torrential rains and floods, more droughts, places that will be uninhabitable due to climatic conditions… or directly because they have been swallowed by the sea. Without going any further, the image you see above these lines is a classic in tourist destinations: the famous and colorful Italian Cinque Terre towns. A research team has elaborated the first map of what awaits them in 2150 and the scenario borders on the apocalyptic. Cinque Terre in serious danger of disappearing. This study analyzes two of the most exposed Cinque Terre towns, Monterosso and Vernazza, projecting how their coast will evolve until the year 2150 under different levels of greenhouse gas emissions according to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). In the worst emissions scenario, the sea level in that area could rise up to 1.17 meters, which means permanently saying goodbye to more than 22,000 square meters of coastline. To make it clear during the World Cup: about three football fields. In the best case scenario, the figure would be “only” 9,931 square meters. The figure may seem low, but in coastal areas with a morphology as narrow and steep as that of the Cinque Terre, they imply the loss of entire beaches, docks and access to transport such as the train that connects them. Thinking more than 100 years ahead may seem far away, but the reality is that the global rate of sea rise has gone from 2.13 mm to almost 5 mm since the 90s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. In short: the process has already started and you have stepped on the accelerator. Why is it important. Because Cinque Terre is the canary in the mine of many other municipalities, touristy or not, that are going to sink in the coming decades in a tragic process that involves demographic, climatic and economic changes. In fact, the decline of beaches and the loss of functionality of ports and infrastructure are already being noticed, which will have a direct impact on the local economy, which depends almost entirely on tourism. But Cinque Terre are more than postcard towns: their cliffs converted into agricultural terraces and their territorial planning have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. Losing them totally or partially is not like a resort collapsing: it is a tragedy. And it won’t be the only one: this study has calculated that of the 49 World Heritage sites on low-lying Mediterranean coasts, 37 are already at risk of serious flooding today and that this risk could increase by 50% before 2100. Context. In the analysis of climate change on the coasts, the Mediterranean has turned on the turbo: it is rising faster than the global average. Between 2000 and 2018, the Mediterranean Sea rose about seven centimeters, a rate much higher than that of the 20th century as a whole. according to research from the British National Oceanography Center. Liguria, the region where Cinque Terre is located, takes the cake: it combines the rise of the sea with a gradual sinking of the land itself. But the reality is global and even darker: in a generalized way we are losing rocky coast and probably faster than we think: science has records of cliff retreats of just 150 years and projections until 2100. In short: we are underestimating the rise in sea level. In detail. This study stands out for how exhaustive it is and the quality and quantity of sources with which it works: it uses topography obtained with high-resolution drones, high-precision seafloor maps, geodetic data of land subsidence with GPS networks and applied the three main IPCC climate scenarios to calculate the projected flooding in 2030, 2050, 2100 and 2150. The usual thing is to stay at 2100, but the team has expanded that horizon with half a century more to see processes that the shorter models overlook: especially the slow sinking of the own land due to geological causes. In fact, there are already studies that evidence that the IPCC forecasts fall short precisely because they ignore that factor. Yes, but. Although the study is rigorous and solid, as the research team itself clarifies, Cinque Terre will not disappear overnight and this apocalyptic scenario will only happen if adaptation and mitigation measures are not adopted. On the other hand, the most unfavorable scenarios take into account global emissions that current climate agreements seek to avoid. In Xataka | There is a corner of Spain where global warming is wreaking havoc: the Pyrenees are becoming “Mediterraneanized” In Xataka | It turns out that there are invasive land snakes that take to the sea from Ibiza. And they are annihilating a unique lizard Cover | Rahul Chakraborty and The First Relative Sea Level Rise and Storm Surges Scenarios up to 2150 CE for the Coasts of Monterosso and Vernazza, Cinque Terre National Park (Liguria, Italy)

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