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Torrevieja and local areas Tuesday, March 15th 2016 - Edition 589
The Cucaracha Club World Premier Thursday March 10th was a night that will go down in Torrevieja's history books as the city's first fully International Crowd Funded film, the Cucaracha Club received its world premiere in the Virgen del Carmen Cultural Centre. Putting aside a few technical and transportation hitches, the full house audience enjoyed a black tie event, complete with Red Carpet, to accompany the historic event. The Cucaracha Club is about a team of retired spies, who now enjoy the good life on the Costa Blanca. They are called back into action in order to find two kidnapped children and on route, the film crew have been making best use of the fantastic scenery and locations along the entire coast, with the idea that the film will also become a stepping stone to other local productions and help boost tourism and knowledge of the area. Many cast members flew in especially from the UK and other parts of Europe especially for the event, including one of the film's start, Tom Watt (from EastEnders Lofty fame) who said he was proud of what writer Billie Anthony Gaddess and the entire team of the film had managed to produce in less than a year. He said it was magnificent and he too was proud to be a part of it as this new style of community filmmaking is for many, the way forward for TV and film production. For more information, please visit: www.siesta.productions.
Tom Watt at the Premier of The Cucaracha Club. More photos on Page 7
Torrevieja's population one hundred thousand inhabitants Torrevieja's new official population figure is now 98,034 residents. The Census and Statistics Department of the City of Torrevieja noted that city has right now 98,034 inhabitants. From the demographic point of view, the city remains the fifth largest in the Valencian Community. The new figures show a huge population drop since 2014 when the City Council made known that the municipality exceeded the 108,000 residents, However the National Statistics Institute (INE) then changed
their rules and made everyone that needed to reregister for the Padron or residencia, which lowered the figure to 91,000 residents. The INE, noted an official census of 105,000 residents in 2013, then confirmed what was an open secret during the second half of the last decade following the economic crisis: that the data registration of Torrevieja and reflection in the INE were inflated, especially because it had not carried out a process of updating and purging those from the Padron in a city with a
large floating population where residents also benefited from access to many free services, such as urban transport. More Spanish: This change has had another important consequence. Of the 98,000 residents, the city now has 50,971 Spanish, and for the first time in decades more than half are of Spanish nationality. Ten years ago the number of foreigners accounted for 53% of the census. Torrevieja remains a multinational city with more than 115 countries represented in the census. And in which the weight of the Central European and British residents has been slightly reduced at the expense of neighbouring Scandinavian presence plus those from Eastern Europe and Russia, and
the North African community. Moroccans, Romanians, Bulgarians and Ukrainians are increasingly important but show little impact economically on the community against British, Russian, German, Belgian and Irish, who are directly associated with residential tourism and the sale of housing plus owning business in the city. However, the INE have admitted that with the British alone, there may be upwards of 85,000 British and Irish homeowners in the city, basing their information on typical
British and Irish names, and this count has not dropped over the past half-decade. These home owners have primarily second homes in Spain and many see zero advantage of joining the Padron and going through the hassle of residencia unless they require a SIP card for medical purposes. With the upcoming EU Referendum for the UK in June, Torrevieja along with many other parts of Spain is waiting to see if this has any impact at all in terms of people returning to the UK, or more people coming to Spain.
Torry take three points
See page 47