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1984-2019
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June 27 – July 10, 2019 EL SOCORRO
Officially the largest foreign language newspaper in the Canary Islands
DODGING TAX?
HEINEKEN
849
LIVE HISTORY
Blue flag success
Home inspections
Jazz & Más Festival
Revisit the past
Page 7
Page 11
Pages 12 & 13
Page 15
A hotel at all costs?
Hundreds of people protested on the penultimate weekend of May at Playa de La Tejita in the borough of Granadilla de Abona against the construction work for the five-star hotel La Tejita Beach Club Resort. First and foremost at the scene was the ecogroup Plataforma Salva La Tejita, founded in 2016, which fought from the outset against the destruction of one of the last virgin coastal sections of Tenerife. They have come a long way. Together with the environmental protection organisation ATAN, they submitted a petition to the coastal authority in Madrid and demanded that the coast be declared a public area and put under a conservation order.
Photo: Salva La Tejita
Continued on page two
Protesters want the construction stopped altogether
UNUSUAL MAY
Weird weather According to statistics from the Aemet state weather office, May 2019 will go down in Spain’s annals as the fourth hottest May on average since 1965. However, temperature differences ran in a rough diagonal across the country, separating unusually hot and extremely hot points in the southwest of the Peninsula and the Canary Islands, from the abnormally cold and very cold regions in the northeast and Balearic Islands. The average temperatures measured in May in the Canarian archipelago are among the five highest recorded in the last 45 years, especially on May 12, 13, 16 and 27, when particularly elevated temperatures of above 30 degrees Celsius were recorded from the coast to 1,200 metres above sea level. Notable peaks took place on May 12 in Tasarte in the southwest of Gran Canaria at 33.9 degrees Celsius, and in the island’s southern municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana at 960 metres above sea level at 33.2
Photo: Aemet
SAVE LA TEJITA
May graphic shows the dry areas of Spain in red
degrees Celsius. While the average temperature in many places was three degrees above the average, including in the Canary Islands at high altitudes, it meanwhile fell two degrees below the normal in regions such as the Basque Country, Navarre and the Balearic Islands. However, some in the Canaries were happy about the fact that not only
the air but also water temperatures rose unusually around the archipelago for May. The Atlantic was warmer by 2.2 degrees, following a continuously rising curve since December.
Where’s the water? May was not only one of the hottest months in the country, but also one
of the driest. “At some measuring stations such as Madrid, Huelva, Cádiz, Córdoba, Jerez de La Frontera, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, it did not rain at all in May,” confirms the weather office Aemet in its monthly evaluation. On the Canary Islands, May 2019, together with May 2003, was the driest since the beginning of this century, adding to an ongoing water deficit across the archipelago. The largest water shortfall is in the eastern islands, where supplies are 75 per cent down, and the least impact is being felt in La Palma, where they are only 20 per cent down. The two main islands, meanwhile, lack about a quarter of the usual water supply levels for this time of year. For the foreseeable future, meteorologists are currently predicting a normally warm summer for the Canary Islands, with temperatures mostly between 25 and a maximum of 30 degrees Celsius. Continued on page two