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INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Madrid’s mango-scented tarmac and the €1M-a-year Airbnb host

In this week’s Inside Spain, we find out why Madrid residents are kicking up a stink over mango-smelling tarmac and how not everything is what it seems with normal-looking Airbnb hosts in Spain.

Published: 27 April 2024 13:31 CEST
Inside Spain: Madrid’s mango-scented tarmac and the €1M-a-year Airbnb host
A normal-looking Airbnb "superhost" with a portfolio of 300 homes has been making headlines in Spain this week, especially because he doesn't own of the properties. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

Residents in some streets of Spain’s capital woke up this week to the scent of tropical fruit, as the city hall rolled out new mango-scented tarmac as a bizarre means of improving foul-smelling odours outdoors, as well as apparently hiding the scent of freshly poured asphalt itself. 

“Those of us who have an especially large pituitary, as is my case, will appreciate it even more,” said Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida. 

“I’m getting dizzy from the strong smell of mango, I live on the first floor and I had to close all the windows for it not to smell indoors,” one less appreciative resident told local TV channel TeleMadrid. 

This mango aroma addition is a trial that’s part of Madrid’s “Operation Asphalt” (a plan to improve city roads), but it’s somewhat backfired on social media among disgruntled madrileños who claim it would’ve been much better to plant fruit trees if that’s a suitable way of improving street smells.

Unfortunately, Madrid authorities have been doing the opposite of that, having chopped down almost 9,000 trees over the past two years.

 Almeida has responded to critics by arguing that more than 5,000 trees have been planted during that time, although their distribution is far less even than it used to be, with the districts of Fuencarral- El Pardo and Hortaleza on the northern outskirts of the city housing 90 percent of these new trees. 

Nowhere exemplifies this better than Madrid’s main square Puerta del Sol as its revamp in 2022 included plenty of new cement but no trees.

It’s a concern for many Madrid residents dreading the dangerously high heat of the summer months, and who are aware that trees not only provide shade but help to keep neighbourhood temperatures down. 

Another story that’s been doing the rounds in Spain this week is that of Fran and Marta, an apparently normal couple with a young daughter who are Airbnb hosts, only that they have a portfolio of 336 properties in Madrid and rake in over €1 million a year. If anyone is a so-called ‘superhost’, it’s them. 

They don’t really own all those homes, they just manage them for the real owners through a company that uses endearing family photos and first names on their Airbnb profiles rather than a more distant and corporate company logo. 

Spanish newspaper El Confidencial lifted the lid on Fran, who is a real person, but sometimes goes by Diego, Rodrigo or Raúl, all with roughly 100 Airbnb listings each. Most of these properties don’t have a tourist property licence. 

Interviewed on Spanish daytime talk show TardeAR, whose host Ana Rosa praised him for the “enormously successful marketing operation” of pretending to be a normal small property holder to Airbnb users, Fran said he only had a mortgage for a small flat in the capital and that “you don’t earn that much”. 

“There are a lot of fake rich people when it comes to holiday lets,” he stated. 

What there are more of than we realise is fake landlords on Airbnb, at a time when the question of short-term holiday lets and their impact on local property and rental markets in Spain has never been greater. 

READ MORE: Who really owns all the Airbnb-style lets in Spain?

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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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