Colourful capital Smoking ban lifted

THE balconies and arches of the town hall in Alicante are now lit up at night, as well as the plaza where it is located.

The area joins those which are already illuminated in the evenings, including the central market, the castle of Santa Bárbara and the Plaza de Los Luceros.

The city council has invested €207,000 in the renovation of the lighting in the town hall, consisting of the installation of 178 LED projectors that allow the creation of different colour sequences for days of special commemoration in the city, as is already done with the central market, Luceros and the castle. The new lighting has adjustable LED equipment, which improves energy efficiency, reinforces the light in the square to give it greater prominence, and enhances the balconies and arches of the town hall.

“The start­up of this project is a double satisfaction”, explained the mayor, Luis Barcala on Thursday, August 3, “because, on the one hand, we give continuity to the continuous improvement of energy efficiency and reduction of the electricity bill in the renewal of public lighting, and on the other, we add a place as emblematic as the Plaza to the list of buildings with ornamental lighting, while reinforcing the charm and tourist potential of the nerve centre of the city”.

THE Leisure and Hospitality Coordinator of the Valencian Community (CEOH) has expressed its satisfaction with the regional government's decision to "meet the demand of the hospitality sector" by eliminating the ban on smoking on terraces.

The Valencian Community was the only national region where the measure taken during the pandemic was maintained.

For the CEOH, the maintenance of this measure "was an unfair decision that penalised terraces" in the community compared to those of the rest ofS ­

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Gully gosh

A tweet regarding an uncomfortable moment with a seagull in Elche has gone viral. The tweet, published back in July, has suddenly spread around the world.

pain.

The Alicante Restaurant Association (ARA) shared its satisfaction of the news saying “We are not going to force terrace owners to allow smoking on them, but at least they will be able to choose".

“This puts an end to a measure that made no sense, since you could be smoking a metre away and standing up and yet it could not be done sitting at a table, and that could also affect the influx of customers to premises", said the president of the Alicante Chamber of Commerce, Carlos Baño.

The surprising and peculiar event was an intimate and eternal encounter that the young woman had with the seagull, which, for five minutes, remained perched on the sand, a few centimetres away, and shared a parasol with her.

This was explained by the person responsible for the publication in the text that accompanied the snapshot, in which she said that the bird stared at her for five long minutes.

To anyone suffering from ornithophobia or still traumatised by Alfred Hitchcock's legendary film, the imposing presence of the bird would make anybody feel uncomfortable.

ALTHOUGH thermometers

in Alicante and Malaga barely show differences, as both cities have reached over 40 degrees during the successive heat waves that have hit Spain this summer, the temperature of the water that bathes their coasts varies by up to eight

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degrees, a situation that may seem strange as both are coastal cities of the Mediterranean. However, it is nothing unusual.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

The head of climatology of the State Meteorological Agency, José Ángel Núñez Mora, indicated that the constant heat waves have caused the average temperature of surface waters (20 miles from the coastline) in the Spanish coastal areas to be 24.6 degrees, "the highest recorded in coastal waters of Spain since at least 1940, exceeding the records of 2015 and 2022".

Therefore, the Mediterranean Sea "is at historic highs", pointed out Núñez Mora, who explained that there are great differences between some areas and others of Spain, as occurs