The Generalitat de Catalunya, through Fira 2000, is negotiating the purchase of the offices in the administrative district of the Zona Franca from the company AXA, where various departments have been located since 2020. Three meetings have already taken place, and very soon, in May, there will be a fourth meeting. These negotiations aim to put an end to 11 years of shadows surrounding this operation promoted in 2015 by the owner of the Zona Franca land, Fira 2000, a commercial company whose majority shareholder (53.6%) is the Generalitat and which also includes the participation of the city councils of Barcelona and L'Hospitalet and the Diputació de Barcelona.

Two investigations against drug trafficking have shown, once again, Barcelona's prominence as one of the entry points for cocaine into Europe, but also how drug traffickers attempt to infiltrate airport structures and bribe workers to assist them in transporting the drugs.

Every year, more than 3 million containers pass through the port of Algeciras. Hundreds of thousands of trucks also pass through. The person in charge of controlling all this material is Lisardo Capote, head of the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA) in the Campo de Gibraltar. He leads the fight against drug trafficking and money laundering in southern Spain: the African coast is only 14 kilometers from the Iberian Peninsula. How is the drug trafficking issue right now?

The violent waves crash against the jetty. It is pitch black. A rainy and cold winter night. At Chechu's Bar, at the entrance to the port of Barbate, young and old alike defy the storm, smoking and finishing their beer. Most no longer live off the sea, but the sea calls to them. A Civil Guard car drives slowly past the bar. Looks of distrust from one and the other. A few hours later, at dawn, the police will return to the port area. A narcolancha has taken refuge there for a while to avoid the furious thrashing of the water. The traffickers' gomones seek refuge in the ports of the area while they wait for their moment.

The old pier on the Barbate River is a graveyard of timbers weathered by time. The barges sunk beneath the greenish water contrast with the white facades of the houses, demanding a coat of paint. The asphalt is full of ruts and cracks. In Barbate, there is no public transport. The theatre is in ruins. The parks, abandoned. The sports facilities flood when it rains. "We have an endemic lag of 15 or 20 years," admits the mayor of the municipality, Miguel Molina.

Driving through it, from the access roads to the main avenues, Marbella has the quality of being a city that could be many other cities. Better said, any other overcrowded city on the Costa Dorada, Costa Brava, French Riviera, or the Costa del Sol itself, of which it is an emblem. The tallest buildings are hotels and not offices, the apartment blocks, also imposing, have communal swimming pools, and the mountains on the horizon are full of white dots; buildings that have destroyed the natural landscape. But if you venture onto the roads that wind through the mountains, you see they are not chalets or old houses: there are many mansions, complexes, tennis clubs, and exclusive golf courses. The health crossing signs are accompanied by signs that say Arzt and Apotheke, not doctor or pharmacy. The billboards are in English and advertise private clinics, mostly for aesthetic tweaks, to treat low fertility or hair loss, aimed at an older demographic who do not want to - or at least want to hide - getting older.

"Tell whoever sent you that next time I will cut his throat." The "next time" the three hitmen lodged about fifty bullets into Catherine Isabelle Castagna and her husband, Jacques René Grangeon. The Lyon clan did not like Castagna's threat and they gunned down the couple in their luxurious villa in the Las Lomas de Marbella urbanization. 50 bullets for the 500 million pesetas that Castagna and Grangeon owed them for losing a hashish game. One bullet for every 10 million (60,000 euros). The Lyonnais clan had recently settled a few months ago on the Costa del Sol to control the route between Morocco and France and they were not messing around. It was the autumn of 1996.

A bright orange Lamborghini speeds up. It's dazzling and makes a deafening noise. It parks in front of you and a young guy gets out, with a slicked-back blonde quiff and well-worked biceps, wearing a Gucci polo shirt worth over 1,000 euros, an appearance he completes with a gold ring and a Rolex watch. You've been following him on social media for a while and admire the money he makes and how he spends it. The cars, the houses, the outfits, the jewelry. You envy his trips around the world. Colombia, Costa Rica, the United Arab Emirates, Japan. You've been taking his advice on investing, on being a winner, for a long time. What is success if it's not what he does? You even set aside some of the little money you have to enjoy the privilege of having him all to yourself for a few hours, so he can explain how he's done it. He gets out of the car and calls you 'crack'. And, automatically, you feel like a crack. He fascinates you. He abducts you. He captivates you. He makes you fall in love.

In 2022, the San Juan de Dios Hospital (SJD) inaugurated the Pediatric Cancer Center of Barcelona (PCCB), an international center with the capacity to treat more than 400 new cases of childhood cancer per year. That same year, a pathway was created for families from Peru, most of them highly vulnerable and desperate due to their children's dramatic situation, who came to Catalonia to receive treatment in the hospital's oncology department. Now, the Catalan Health Department intends to put an end to this: they have detected regular flows of patients to the SJD, a privately owned public center, as well as the arrival of patients of other nationalities to Vall d'Hebron and Sant Pau Hospital, and they want to regulate it. When the PCCB was launched four years ago by the Peruvian medical director, Andrés Morales, the aim was to internationalize the center and attract patients from other countries in order to fill all the beds and make it profitable. Currently, 65% of the beds are occupied. According to data from the Catalan Health Department (Salut), foreign patients represented almost half of all minors treated at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital in 2025. Specifically, of the 252 children hospitalized, 123 were born outside of Spain. However, the majority of patients who have arrived since 2022 for cancer treatment are part of the public healthcare system; that is, they do not pay for treatment, as they would in a private hospital, and access services with a health card. In fact, the hospital treats almost two-thirds of all foreign pediatric patients in the Catalan healthcare system.

"He has a teacher for you to teach you to speak Russian. She's 2x8 years old and not blonde. The lessons are free, and you can have your first one today if you call." This is a message from Jean-Luc Brunel to Jeffrey Epstein on April 1, 2005. The message was jotted down in a notebook by one of the people who worked for the American magnate at the time. Brunel was the director of a French modeling agency and committed suicide in 2022 while awaiting trial for child sex trafficking. At the time he left this phone message, he was a close friend of Epstein and had become one of his main pimps: he not only provided him with models but also underage girls. And he did so with the impunity of being able to leave a phone message like this, leaving a written trail. In fact, the documents declassified by the U.S. Department of Justice contain hundreds of notes that Epstein's employees made of the calls he received and couldn't answer. Some are very explicit. However, no one did anything.

Everything was fine. The food. The treatment. The attention. The services. Until the tourists left at the beginning of autumn. "From one day to the next, we went from being good families to bad families," explains a Syrian woman who is part of a large group of asylum seekers residing in Malgrat de Mar and who denounce the feeling of "abandonment" they have experienced since October. They claim to have found cockroaches in the food, to have been given flowery and expired food, to have had fleas in the rooms, for the heating not to have worked for months on one of the floors of the hotel where they are staying, for the hot water to have constant problems, and for being denied money to buy clothes or transportation tickets that they are entitled to.

The U.S. Department of Justice has declassified new documents related to the Epstein case. These include FBI files containing a woman's accusation against President Donald Trump. According to the documents released early this morning, Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was between 13 and 15 years old. In 2019, the woman told federal agents that Jeffrey Epstein took her "off the island" of Little Saint James to "New York or New Jersey," where she was introduced to someone "with a lot of money" who "was Donald Trump." There, in the presence of other people whom the woman could not identify, the current U.S. president allegedly sexually assaulted her. "Let me show you how little girls should behave," the victim recounts Trump saying before taking her to a room. There, according to her testimony, he began sexually assaulting her, but when she, then a teenager, resisted, Trump hit her and had her taken away.

The journalist Mar Bermúdez (Barcelona, ​​1998) goes report your boss in The MainThe former director of Catalunya Ràdio, Saúl Gordillo, was arrested in December 2022 for sexual assault. A case that would end in sentencing Two years later. And in 2025, Gordillo agreed to a sentence of one and a half years in prison for the sexual assault of a second female employee of the media outlet he directed in 2022. The MainNow Bermúdez recounts the experience he had in The sins of a feminist: the awakening of a journalistic #MeToo movement (Ara Llibres), a book that narrates, from a feminist perspective and with a structure based on the seven deadly sins, what it means to denounce a powerful person with influential friends. Which is the worst deadly sin?

Not even the statue of Goya could be removed from Plaça Sant Jaume. The housing movement, which gathered in the center of Barcelona to demand the right to a roof over one's head, prevented the truck from taking away the giant bust of the Aragonese painter, placed in the middle of the square for the Spanish film awards ceremony held in Barcelona. At least, until the end of the demonstration under the slogan "Enough excuses. Apartments are for living," which filled more than half of the Barcelona square. The square can hold about 6,000 people when full, but according to the Barcelona police, the protest drew 1,100. Protests by social organizations followed. from the agreement between Junts, PP and Vox In Congress, protesters sought to overturn Pedro Sánchez's social measures package, which included an anti-eviction law. A vote in Madrid that will leave many "vulnerable families" homeless has prompted Enric Aragonès, spokesperson for the Rental Companies Union, to denounce the situation: "If we keep repeating that the economy is improving, but we continue to live worse and worse, we already know who is taking advantage of this frustration; it's fertile ground for extremism." The mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni, and Míriam Nogueras, spokesperson for Junts in Congress, have borne the brunt of the criticism. Much of the frustration of the protesters, who see how increasingly difficult it is to live with dignity in their city, has been directed at them. The Socialist mayor is criticized for "rolling out the red carpet" for "investment funds," as one banner proclaimed. "Collboni, no matter how much he gestures, is doing the same thing as Abascal," denounced Marta Espriu of the Housing Union Confederation. Nogueras was remembered as a representative of a "right wing" that has sided "with employers" and whose vote is pushing many vulnerable families toward homelessness. "150,000 tenants live in fear of when their contracts will end," lamented Espriu, who estimated that 13,000 families could be affected by the end of the moratorium voted on in Congress by Junts and the Spanish right and far right. Among pensioners and representatives of the left demanding an end to speculative housing purchases was also a group of young people from a recreation center in Gràcia. Thirty teenagers who also called for a better future. “We won’t have decent housing when we grow up, and we won’t be able to live in our neighborhood,” lamented 17-year-old Guim. “We see that housing prices are rising, and with the salaries we’ll have, we won’t be able to buy a place or move out on our own. Never,” added 16-year-old Bruna. “You can’t speculate with a person’s rights. If you can’t leave someone who is dying unattended, you can’t leave someone without a home either. Let them make a business of other things, let them sell nougat or cars,” concluded Biel, one of the youngest in the group at 15.

Kesia Barranco arrived in Torre Pacheco more than two decades ago from her native Basque Country. She came with her partner, a Moroccan man, with whom she built her life in this small town in Murcia. Now 38, she is one of the leading voices in the demands of the Muslim community, especially after a group of men brutally attacked her 15-year-old son, Ismael, because of his physical appearance. This attack came two days after three young men of Moroccan origin robbed—and one of them assaulted—a 68-year-old man, Domingo, as he was taking a peaceful walk through the town. This incident prompted the far right will throw in the streets of Torre Pacheco.

A couple of kilometers from Torre Pacheco, about fifteen workers, all of them immigrants, harvest endives under the warm, restorative winter sun. On the other side of the field, another group toils to do the same with celery stalks. The tractors and trucks that will load the crates of vegetables destined for Europe are haphazardly parked on a dusty road. The seasonal workers repeat the movement cyclically, torsos bent over again and again to pull up the stalks. A movement repeated hundreds of times each day. Abdel is the foreman of the group hauling the endives. They are all from Morocco. He arrived 26 years ago in this Murcian municipality, where he lived in July 2025. some racist incidents Following the attack on a 68-year-old man, Domingo, by three young men of North African origin, the far right descended upon Torre Pacheco, "hunting" for North Africans. The ensuing nights of intense tension were only contained by a deployment of nearly 60 Civil Guard vehicles.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein is not just that of a pedophile who ran a prostitution ring catering to wealthy men worldwide. It is also a story of money, politics, and above all, power. Epstein used sex to buy favors and influence, but also to obtain information and increase his fortune. The American magnate, who committed suicide in 2019 in a New York prison, had a network of accomplices who procured young models and minors for him. But he was also the mastermind behind the scheme. What did the wealthy men who came to him want? He provided it and opened the doors of the island to them. Little Saint James: a paradise in the Caribbean where he invited some of the most influential people on the planet and where some of these men assaulted and raped dozens of minors.

In April 2017, Daniel Siad sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein to thank him. This French-Algerian man had just settled in Barcelona and announced that he had already contacted two modeling agencies based in Spain to begin "the"scouting"Of girls. "Spain is safer than Paris, especially Barcelona, ​​it's full of tourists everywhere," the man adds. The documentation that the United States Department of Justice has declassified regarding the Epstein case has allowed thousands of documents of conversations and emails that the pedophile and corrupter of minors had with celebrities, businessmen, and facilitators he had scattered all over the world to come to light. Siad was one of them. The conversations that Epstein had with many young girls also appear.

It is a dry, arid land, dotted with scrubland, cacti, and white rockrose. And suddenly, from the barren landscape emerges an immense white expanse almost 30 kilometers long, guarded by the Gádor mountain range and the Mediterranean Sea. This is Almería's sea of ​​plastic, the great vegetable garden of Europe, where nearly 100,000 workers labor, most of them immigrants, and about 30% of them undocumented. In total, there are some 35,000 hectares of greenhouses—the equivalent of 50,000 football fields combined—that can produce up to 3.5 million tons of vegetables and fruits: peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini... Tens of thousands of greenhouses engulf everything, penetrating the towns and cities of the region, white plastic sheets visible from space, blending in with houses and industrial buildings. It is the economic engine of the region: on one side the western area, surrounding El Ejido; on the other valley, the vast esplanade at the foot of the municipality of Níjar.

"Hamsa, I don't see you at school." Joaqui Salord stops a young Moroccan man walking in flip-flops despite the harsh winter weather near Barranco del Búho, a filthy pit of garbage and plastic. The scene repeats itself a few minutes later, as the veteran Jesuit walks among the shacks of Don Domingo de Arriba, in Atochares, a settlement where nearly 600 people live. Kofi cleans his mud-caked clothes while listening to the radio in the background. The stains aren't even concealed by the Ghanaian veteran's meticulous brushing. The same question is posed, and Kofi, battered by poverty and emaciated from two years living among ruins, excuses himself by saying he missed the small open-air classroom the Jesuits run to teach Spanish to immigrants. Atochares is the largest settlement in the province of Almería. The lack of housing for those working in the greenhouses of the "sea of ​​plastic" has led to a proliferation of these substandard dwellings. In the Níjar Valley alone, in the Levante region of the vast "Orchard of Europe," there are almost fifty.