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www.theolivepress.es Voted top expat paper in Spain
A campaigning, community newspaper, the Olive Press represents the huge expatriate community in Spain with an estimated readership, including the websites, of more than two million people a month.
OPINION SALT IN THE WOUND BREXIT has complicated the life of tens of thousands of Britons who live in Spain. For those who had been here for years and had all their paperwork in order, Brexit brought the occasional practical hurdle – the odd bureaucratic hoop to jump through in order to swap the old green residency card issued to citizens from EU nations for the new biometric TIE card, for example. But then there are those who had to scramble to get themselves legalised, who had been slow to pick up on warnings to have everything in order and were then blindsided by the restrictions of a pandemic as Brexit approached. Many of these people turned to ‘experts’ in the form of gestors to help smooth the application process, paying large fees to navigate a system that seemed baffling, especially without a good command of Spanish.
Help
It is particularly appalling when we have to report on the strife faced by those who sought the help of these experts only to be spectacularly let down and find themselves in a legal limbo over their residency status or facing pending action in the courts. The situation that Lily Higgins finds herself in is even worse. Not only was she hauled off to the local police station to explain why her residency application included forged documents presented by the gestor she paid to represent her, but she has now been forced to return to the UK with nothing, her dream of retiring to sunny Spain in tatters. Now she learns that the gestor she holds responsible for her fate, far from facing justice for his malpractice, has instead been rewarded with a position of power by the local council. Brexit is to blame for a lot of things, but this has added salt to the wound.
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Cross to bear
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PAIN’S Catholic Church has refused to launch an independent inquiry into the shocking sexual abuse carried out within its ranks over the past 70 years. Unbelievably it maintains ‘there’s only a few cases,’ amounting to ‘0.8%’ of the priesthood. At the end of a week-long gathering of bishops in Madrid, it stated: “We are not prepared to undertake sociological or statistical investigations. Why is all the focus on the Catholic Church? There are cases in sports federations. Has FIFA or the Spanish Olympic Committee been asked for a general investigation?”
Claim
The Church also made the surprising claim that it was frontrunners on tackling the issue. “We are the first Episcopal Conference in the world to approve a collection of norms with which to deal with cases of sexual abuse against minors,” Church spokesman, Luis Argüello, declared after the convention, although he admitted that none of the victims had been given the space to air their grievances during the gathering. Spain is the only country in Europe, apart from Italy, to be downplaying the abuse. Portugal has just given the
C
ARLOS Ruiz Zafon needs no introduction. Arguably the most recognised contemporary writer in Spain, he has an equally successful international reputation. Translated into over 50 languages, literary critics have often compared Zafon to none other than Miguel de Cervantes in style, popularity and literary impact. Carlos’s trilogy The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, combined with his most recent book The Labyrinth of the Spirits (El Laberinte de los Esperitos), are perennial best-sellers around the world. Zafon’s series arrived on the publishing scene with contemporaries Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling. Their popular genre shared countless tomes: tormented characters, often seeking knowledge centered around secrets to be found in books and archives. ‘Tales
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green light for a national investigative commission, and France recently presented the 2,500-page Suavé report, car-
ried out externally but funded by the Church, on murky practises taking place in its inner sanctum, citing at least
216,000 victims of between 2,900 and 3,200 paedophile priests since 1950. Other countries to have taken
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While the Catholic Church in France and Spain seek to investigate wrongdoings, Spain’s clergy hides and wriggles over child sex abuse claims, writes Heather Galloway
REFUSED: Carlos Zafon
Spain’s once-leading Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who died last year, refused to have his books turned into films, Jack Gaioni explains why within tales’, giving way to ‘books within books’, with multiple subplots became a flourishing subgenre with the reading public. Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Rowling’s Harry Potter would go on to become record-breaking hits at the cinema box-office. Curiously, Zafon rejected the many lucrative offers to turn his books into movies and he had some very strong opinions as to why.
Pondered Carlos had been consistent with his personal mission to encourage people to recover the pleasure of reading. In our flashy, crazed world of the internet, smart phones, video games and digital streaming, Zafon believed the joy of reading was being forgotten. “Reading”, said Zafon, “is a primal force in which we, the readers, collaborate with the authors to create adventures, empathy and memories not unlike those of our real lives.” He believed ‘books are mirrors to the soul’ and by reading we develop stronger analytical skills by taking note of detail. It is perhaps ironic
that before Carlos Ruiz Zafon became an international best seller, he began his career as a screenplay writer in the movie capital of the world - Los Angeles, California. He was an avid fan of the film noir genre and had notable success as a Hollywood screenwriter. He would be the first to admit this genre, marked by moods of pessimism, fatalism and menace was a major influence on his later written work. But Carlos saw a disconnect between storytelling as novel verses adapting that same story to a movie. Movies, he believed, are experienced by the audience in one 90 to 120 minute block of time but books may be picked up and put down, pondered and digested, multiple times before completion. Carlos believed that, by reading, content could be taken in at intervals dictated by the reader’s ‘rhythm of consumption’. He once famously said that unlike movies, ‘books have no beginnings or endings - only points of entry’. Since something is lost from the transition from books to movies, Carlos was emphatic in not wanting to spend the time remaking his stories into another media. He claimed that developing characters and interlocking plots so precariously, he feared his stories would ‘explode’ if he tinkered with them by adapting
