Tomorrow marks the start of the fifth edition of the Toca’m festival in Tortosa, which maintains its commitment to placing twelve pianos in the streets, distributed across different parts of the city. There will be a total of 28 venues, including new locations such as the Episcopal Palace, the Puríssima convent, the courtyard of the Despuig palace, and the Sant Joan advance posts. The festival will run until next Sunday. Toca’m also reinforces its territorial focus with activities in Flix on April 25th and in Cases d’Alcanar on July 4th.

Sant Blai street has historically been one of the most commercial in Tortosa and well illustrates the changes the city has undergone in recent years. In the capital of Baix Ebre live about 36,000 people, 23.5% of whom are of foreign origin. Many of the immigrants work in the fields or run small establishments in the city. This is the case of Oman, who opened a restaurant on Sant Blai street a year and a half ago, the Luxury Rif. It is flanked by a call shop, on one side, and a kebab shop, a few meters away. A neighbor enters and asks if he minds if he orders something to eat. Oman, who is in the middle of Ramadan when we do this report, says no. "We are here, working hard," he explains about the business, where traditional Moroccan food is served. Moroccans are the foreign population group with the most weight in the region: they represent 30% of foreigners, according to Idescat data.

The Ebro River has been, is, and will be one of the most important axes not only of Catalonia but of all of southern Europe. Perhaps even more so in the past, considering it as a road network, but as a communication, cultural, and commercial axis… it is unbeatable! This relationship extends not only from the Delta to Reinosa, but also from one bank to the other. In Tortosa, this is almost physically visible. The river is not a backdrop: it is a constant presence, an active memory, and a shared horizon. For centuries, the Ebro has shaped the city and determined its open, commercial, and diverse character. Here, the river doesn't separate; it connects. In this context, the Municipal Market is not just any facility. Located by the water, it is a direct heir to this culture of exchange. If the Ebro has been a means of communication, the market has been its public square; if the river has transported goods and people, the market has transformed them into relationships, conversations, and everyday life.

Just over a year ago lThe National Court sent four former mayors of Convergència to trial. for the Efial corruption plot. Then the Town councils of Ametlla de Mar and Ascó, Torredembarra and Vandellòs were judicially implicated in the case of illicit contracting that embezzled more than 8.7 million euros in fourteen Catalan municipalitiesOf all of them, Tortosa is the third most affected city council, with one million euros stolen, but so far no member of the then council has been investigated. The newspaper Ebredigital On Tuesday, the Ministry of Public Health published various fragments of compromised emails between the president of Efial, Antonio Martos, and the then president of the municipal urban planning management company (GUMTSA) and councilor for Urban Planning, Meritxell Roigé, who would later become mayor of the city.

After years of setbacks, the Tortosa City Council and the Generalitat have found a plan B to locate the University Hospital of Terres de l'Ebre in a new area with no risk of flooding and larger than initially planned. This Thursday, the Regional Minister for Territory, Housing, and Ecological Transition, Sílvia Paneque, signed a protocol with the Mayor of Tortosa, Jordi Jordan, by which the Generalitat (Catalan Government) commits to guaranteeing the urban planning procedures to facilitate access to the new hospital center that will be built in Raval de la Llet, in the Sant Llàtzer neighborhood.

The story of the new reference hospital in Terres de l'Ebre continues to accumulate chapters. In 2006, the Minister of Health, Marina Geli, announced the construction of a complex on the outskirts of Tortosa, a reference hospital for 180,000 people from Baix Ebre, Montsià, Terra Alta and Ribera d'Ebre. Three months later, the Generalitat stated this on an information board located on land in the Partial Plan of La Farinera, where the centre was planned. But almost twenty years later there is no hospital, nor land to build it. This Friday, the Generalitat has recognised that after delays and a thousand vicissitudes - economic crisis, budget cuts and a bureaucratic and technical labyrinth, old territorial and neighbourhood political grievances - the plots that the Tortosa City Council had acquired in the previous term to definitively house the new health complex are not valid due to their nature.