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INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: An independent León and will a shorter workday work?

In this week’s Inside Spain, we look at why the Spanish province of León no longer wants to be part of Castilla y León and why not everyone is happy about the Spanish government’s planned reduction in daily work hours.

Published: 29 June 2024 12:58 CEST
Inside Spain: An independent León and will a shorter workday work?
León (meaning Lion in Spanish) was an autonomous kingdom for hundreds of years. Now it wants to regain that status. Photo: Xavi López/Wikipedia

Castilla y León is Spain’s biggest region and very much off the tourist trail, given its location in the country’s interior away from the beaches and resorts. 

It’s made up of nine provinces: Ávila, Burgos, Palencia, Salamanca, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid, Zamora and León, all of which conjure up images of a bygone time where castles, knights and sparse plains dominated the landscapes.

But all is not well in this autonomous community as the province of León wants to break away from the Castilla part of Castilla Y León and become Spain’s 18th region, in what the Spanish press have dubbed ‘Lexit’, a combo of León and Exit. 

Political party The Leonese People’s Union (UPL) on Wednesday proposed in the regional parliament that León, Zamora and Salamanca become an independent autonomous community called León, a motion supported by the Socialists but rejected by right-wing parties PP and Vox.

As a poll carried out by Electomanía reflects, Leonese people are the Spaniards that feel less identified by their autonomous region. 

The Kingdom of León, which encompassed the provinces of León, Zamora and Salamanca, did exist from 910 to 1833, up until when the modern Spanish territorial demarcation was defined and divided this historic territory into three provinces.

READ ALSO: Moving to Spain – Which city in Castilla y León is the best?

There have been calls for independence for León for some forty years, with nostalgia and the sense that the provinces that make up Castilla are holding León back due to their deindustrialisation and crucially depopulation, as this part is the country is very much what’s known as ‘Empty Spain’.

Whether this ‘Lexit’ actually comes to fruition is unlikely, but it does serve as evidence that apart from the Basque and Catalan independence pushes to break away from Spain, there are other corners of the country that want greater autonomy.

In fact, the crime-riddled Andalusian city of La Línea de la Concepción right next to Gibraltar, and the vastly underpopulated Aragonese province of Teruel have also in recent years suggested gaining independence from their autonomous communities to better deal with their problems. 

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On another note, last January Spanish Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz said her ministry would soon reduce the working week by two and a half hours (half an hour less a day), a decision aimed at improving the work-life balance of 12 million employees across the country.

The plan is for it to go from the current 40 hours per week to 38.5 hours by September 2024 when the legislation is expected to be approved, and 37.5 hours at the start of 2025. 

Spain has a serious problem with unpaid extra work hours, especially in the private sector, so the Spanish Labour Ministry wants to ensure unions and the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) actually stick to the new rules with more inspections and tighter fines. 

Díaz has accused CEOE of kicking the can down the road by not presenting any proposal to the workday reduction over the past six months.

And this may come as no surprise, given that most business associations in Spain have opposed the measure, from stressing how much it will cost the country economically (SMEs will reportedly lose €42 billion) to saying businesses may close down and jobs lost.

Spanish economist José Emilio Boscá described another reason for the work reduction – spreading out the work among more people – as a “fallacy” that won’t work, and argued that in regions such as the Basque Country where high productivity levels have been reached, shorter work days have been agreed to as a result, but doing so in unproductive regions has never been tested yet. 

Furthermore, in a country where hours behind the desk have always tended to count more than productivity, and where legislation that’s rolled out doesn’t always get properly implemented in practice, it’s hard to believe that all workers will be able to clock off 30 minutes earlier soon.

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INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Valencia’s mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

In this week's Inside Spain we look at how Valencia is releasing 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes to deal with an insect plague and how villages named after Spain's dictator Franco are ignoring a law forcing them to change their names.

Published: 22 June 2024 13:09 CEST
Inside Spain: Valencia's mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.

Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.

Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly. 

In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.

Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions. 

As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years. 

Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).

Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works. 

Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it’s black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.

Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.

On a completely different note, Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.

It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law

One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).

These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few. 

In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times. 

However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history. 

The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.

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