Sant Hipòlit de Voltregà has 3,500 inhabitants and covers just one square kilometer. This village, one of the smallest in Catalonia, has its sights set on several European funding opportunities that could give the municipality a boost, for example, to renovate the hockey team's pavilion—which has brought it international fame—or the municipal residence. But there's a problem: the paperwork required to apply for these lucrative grants is insurmountable for a town council with only one technician available. "We would love to apply, but out of prudence, we don't. If you don't carry out the project, you have to pay the money back," explains Gerard Sancho, the mayor of Sant Hipòlit, to ARA. Because of cases like this, the Catalan government will launch a specialized team to assist local entities in drafting and submitting projects to secure European funding. This unit is part of a series of measures announced this Sunday by the Minister for European Union and Foreign Action, Jaume Duch. Its objective is to bring Europe closer to Catalan municipalities—especially those with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants—and includes establishing avenues for collaboration to organize events explaining the European project, arranging visits to European institutions, and promoting twinning with municipalities in EU member states. "What we want is for the municipalities of Catalonia not to miss out on opportunities that should be available to them," Duch emphasized. The increased resources for drafting European projects should make life easier for mayors of small municipalities, who are already struggling to manage day-to-day affairs. with interim officials and technicians which they often have to share with other local councils. Facilitating access to European funds also helps prevent the gap "between rural and urban areas" from widening, Sancho emphasizes, adding that he conveyed this to the regional minister when he visited him. Now the regional government has taken note and plans to have five technicians working exclusively for the municipalities within three years.

"Wild boars don't understand borders." These are the words of an environmental technician from a municipality in the Baix Llobregat region, which perfectly summarize the problems local councils face in controlling wildlife. All of this has gained prominence in the wake of the crisis. due to the outbreak of African swine feverBut for months—and in some cases, years—metropolitan municipalities with nearby mountains have been rolling up their sleeves to keep these wild boars under control. The problem arises when, outside of natural parks, the option chosen by one municipality affects the situation of another: either because it opts for hunting, which causes the wild boars—very sensitive to noise—to move to another area, or because it does nothing to control them. It's a scenario that turns municipal management of wild boar control into a veritable arena for game theory. This dilemma occurs, for example, in Sant Climent and the villages surrounding Sant Ramon mountain. The village's hunting society regularly conducts wild boar hunts within the municipal boundaries, which are entirely a hunting area. However, the city council warns that these efforts are "insufficient if neighboring municipalities do not implement similar measures" or if hunting is restricted in nearby areas—as is the case in so-called safety zones. This is the case, for example, in Sant Boi de Llobregat, where the standard control method is capture with cages followed by anesthesia by a veterinarian, and in Viladecans, where they are in the process of hiring a specialized company to do the same following incidents that occurred in the town center last autumn.

The mayor of Manacor, Miquel Oliver, arrives at the Catalan Summer University (UCE) in Prada de Conflent wearing sandals and a short-sleeved shirt that reveals the tattoo he has on his forearm: "144." These are the days he governed when he first became mayor with Més per Mallorca in 2015, before the opposition snatched it from him. with a motion of censureRe-elected in 2019 in a municipality traditionally dominated by the right-wing PP, Oliver defines himself as a left-wing pro-independence party. In fact, he's in the UCE for this very reason: to reclaim the shared cultural identity of the Països Catalans and defend the idea that Manacor is "something more" than the Levante region of Mallorca. This has been one of his obsessions since his awakening as a pro-independence party, when he came into contact with the student movements. despite being part of a family that had voted for the PP.

After three years of procedures, the urban plan to build a macro biogas plant in Sentiu de Sió (Noguera) has received the green light from the Barcelona Urban Planning Commission. It is the largest facility of its kind in southern Europe—it will process around 500,000 tons annually—and could be the first in a wave of biogas factories in Ponent, as part of the rollout of the Catalan Biogas Strategy 2024-2030. However, both the approval of the urban plan and the possibility of more factories proliferating have sparked outrage among some thirty mayors in the region, who are standing firm against the project and have announced they will challenge it in court. Despite the silence of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), the mayors warn that the factory will not be able to operate solely with local slurry and that, in practice, it is a black hole for the Danish investment fund leading it—Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners—to do business with waste that will come either from Aragon or the province of Barcelona. This waste includes animal remains and slaughterhouse waste, and not just slurry.