⚽️ This week in Spain: Own Goal in Barcelona
Also: Narcosubs, that sexy Equality ad, and Vox's frenemy (again).
By @IanMount and @AdrianBono
March 16, Madrid
🎉 Welcome to the fifth (beta) issue of Tapa, an English-language, weekly newsletter about all things Spain!
One thing before we start: 🫶 We’re extremely happy with the positive response we’ve had so far. We’ve also listened to your feedback and, after some internal discussions, we’ve decided to split this newsletter into two. The first, which you will get on Thursdays, will be focused on the news of the week and in-depth analysis. A second, that we will send on Fridays, will include options for the weekend along with some other light-hearted commentary (so basically memes).
If you feel that two emails per week is too much, you will be able to opt out of whichever you don’t want to spare you the inbox cluttering.
Oh, and we’ve decided on a new name that doesn’t sound like an exchange student’s food blog! We’ll roll that out soon. In the meantime, you can reach us at tapa@substack.com.
🕺If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so by clicking on the button below.
Talk about an own goal
💰 The payments were for what?
FC Barcelona is in increasingly hot water over payments it made to the VP of Spain’s referees committee, José María Enríquez Negreira. This week, Spain’s Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz assigned the prosecutor’s sports and business fraud case against Barça to a court that specializes in corruption and organized crime, and the judge overseeing the case in Barcelona ordered the Guardia Civil to investigate why Barça paid Negreira—and whether he did legal work for the money.
The case took off a month ago, when it came to light that between 2001 and 2018 Barça paid €7.3m to businesses linked to Negreira. Barça officials claimed they were for reports about the style and behavior of the referees who would oversee Barça’s upcoming games.
State prosecutors disagreed. The fiscalía had been investigating the big payments since May 2022 because they did not seem to have been made for real work.
A referee named Xavier Estrada Fernández then filed suit against Negreira and his son for alleged sports corruption. That forced the hand of the prosecutors’s office, which filed its own case last Friday.
That filing was full of explosive allegations. Fraud, falsified business documents and, most damning, sports corruption—that is, Negreira was paid to take actions that would “favor FCB in terms of the decisions taken by referees.” In other words, buying the ref.
It sounds terrible, but wait. First filings by Spain’s state prosecutors are not criminal charges per se, but hypothetical roadmaps based on a mix of fact and suspicion. Now, the fiscalía will gather and present more evidence in the hope of convincing the judge to let them take the case to trial.
That Barça paid Negreira is clear. But then did Negreira actually pay off referees? Or, using his role in the referees organization, did he reward referees who were lenient on Barça with better assignments—and punish those who weren’t? Or…something else? There is no proof yet that these payments “bought” refs. Uncovering that—and finding witnesses to speak—will be incredibly hard.
That’s why El País suggests that FC Barcelona will most likely face a fine, not a suspension of its business or jail time for anyone involved. Still, unjustified payments alone will likely be enough for some punishment under Spanish law, no matter how much current and former Barça execs call such payments normal.
Prosecutors want to call former Barça coaches Ernesto Valverde and Luis Enrique as witnesses. If they didn’t see the supposed reports, it will be hard to argue the payments were for their production.
At least we can speculate: The Caso Negreira has created a whole Zapruder film-style genre of online game analysis of refs supposedly aiding Barcelona.
Opposing team fans are not happy: At Barça’s game in Bilbao against Athletic last weekend, the local fans tossed monopoly money printed with MAFIA$ onto the field.
🔔 A Message From Our Sponsor
Secret Kingdoms is your English bookstore in Madrid. It specializes in Spanish history and literature, contemporary and classic novels, books for children and young adults of all ages, history and historical fiction, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, biographies and much more.
Located on Calle de Moratín 7 — a few blocks away from the Prado Museum — and with over 20,000 new and used books, Secret Kingdoms has something for everyone.
Find out more at www.thesecretkingdoms.com
💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week:
1. Das Boot IV
Finding a sunken, abandoned submarine would surprise most people—but not in Galicia. A fishing boat captain found a submerged “narcosubmarine” on the Río Arousa, near the Vilagarcía coast, on Monday.
Drug-transporting narcosubs from South America have become a bit of a thing in Galicia in recent years. The first was found in 2006 near Vigo. In that case, the 12-meter sub wasn’t meant to cross the Atlantic, but to collect a ton or so of drugs from a boat offshore.
A second sub was found in 2019, and this one was meant to bring 3 tons of cocaine from Brazil. It did—until after some three weeks of travel, the crew, which included a junior boxing champion named Agustín Álvarez, was caught.
The 2023 narcosub was found without its crew—and without the 5 tons of coke it might have carried. The abandoned sub was refloated on Tuesday.
Old friends: PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez brought up Galicia-born PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s acquaintance with drug trafficker Marcial Dorado last week in parliament, which resurfaced old photos of Feijóo with Dorado on a boat in Galicia…near where the latest submarine was found.
Haven’t I seen you before? The German movie Das Boot includes a sequence where the WWII U-boat of the title pulls into the Vigo (Galicia) harbor and its crew has dinner with officers of an interned German merchant vessel.
2. Franco fails in tryout as architecture preservationist
The Tribunal Supremo gave the green light to plans to exhume bodies of Civil War and dictatorship victims from the Valle de los Caídos in San Lorenzo de El Escorial.
In April 2021, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez asked the San Lorenzo city hall for permission to exhume the bodies.
San Lorenzo gave permission in June 2021.
But in November 2021, a judge in Madrid granted a temporary injunction to stop the work. The injunction was requested by the Asociación por la Reconciliación y la Verdad Histórica (ARVH)—which argued that the works would cause irreversible harm to the Valle buildings and intrude on the “right to privacy of the dead and their families”. As the name might (not?) suggest, the ARVH would like everyone to please stop bringing up the unpleasantness about Franco and the civil war.
The Tribunal Supremo has now definitively thrown out the association’s complaints as well as one from the Fundación Francisco Franco, in theory removing the last obstacle to the exhumations. Disagreeing with the preservationist stance of the pro-Franco camp, the court said work would not involve “an irreversible transformation of the crypts.”
So families of the dead can start looking for the bodies of their relatives soon? Not so fast. A judge first authorized the exhumations in 2016 and the ARVH plans to extend the delay by filing to annul the Tribunal Supremo’s ruling.
3. The new BiciMAD rollout is an absolute desastre
BiciMAD, Madrid’s bike-share system since 2014, has badly needed an overhaul for a while. So Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida was understandably grinning last week when he appeared at a Calle Alcalá bike station to unveil a new electric bicycle fleet.
Madrid city hall announced a renovation of the fleet and the expansion of the system to eight more neighborhoods a year ago. Now, the mayor was hailing 700 new bikes to be deployed in over 60 bike stations. Even better, he said the service would be free until July 31. Happiness!
But the good news was last week. Yesterday, El País published a scathing review of the new system’s first seven days that describes a buggy app, endless user complaints, incompatibility between the new bikes and the old docking stations and even the alleged disappearance of over 500 bicycles.
“Chaos.” Since the old white bikes aren’t compatible with the new docking stations, and the new blue bikes aren’t compatible with the old ones, users just leave them loose, forcing BiciMAD to track down the bikes to charge them.
We at Tapa can verify that it’s been an absolute clusterf&$*.
4. That ad from the Equality Ministry
“Now that you see us, let’s talk about feminism.” That’s the slogan used by the Equality Ministry in a 90-second ad released last week to coincide with International Women’s Day. The spot attempts to shine a light on the importance of sexual education and the unfairness of certain sexual taboos.
The diverse, very sex-positive ad has (once again) ignited a fiery debate. Progressives praised it for not “silencing” certain sexual activities and conservatives criticized it for its “explicit” sexual content.
Far-right Vox called it “repugnant” on Twitter and one of their congresswomen urged Equality minister Irene Montero and her team “to go see a sexologist so they can better communicate with their partners”.
5. Little confidence in no-confidence
Love is ephemeral. Only a few weeks ago economist Ramón Tamames was announced as Vox’s pick to lead the motion of no-confidence against Pedro Sánchez.
Since then, the octogenarian ex-communist has increasingly made it clear in various interviews that there is an ideological abyss between him and the party led by Santiago Abascal.
Not eye to eye: In an interview with El Mundo, Tamames defended his belief that Spain is a “nation of nations” (a verboten idea to the anti-separatist Vox), criticized Vox’s flag-waving, and said he’d invited Sánchez to dine before the no-confidence debate. Vox EMP Jorge Buxadé responded by saying the problem was others loved the flag too little and he would never dine with the PM.
Their differences really come as no surprise (as we reported) but it is certainly making Vox nervous—to the point that they forced a joint press conference alongside Tamames to at least appear to be united against Sánchez.
Vox’s motion to throw out Sánchez will be debated on March 21. The motion won’t pass and analysts say it could end up benefiting Sánchez in an election year.
🎙Headlines of the week
🥂 Trust me—I’m a millionaire. In preparation for the Real Madrid-Liverpool Champions League quarterfinal game at the Bernabeu Wednesday night, two English tourists went wild at the Commo disco in Madrid. They paid off the first €1,000 of their tab, but then after buying 90 champagnes for the ladies at the bar, they tried to simpa (dine and dash) on the next €2,200—and were caught in the act.
🙄 You can’t have €2,200 in free champagne, but we will let you drive on our roads. After much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, Spain has reinstated its agreement with the U.K. that allows Brits to use their U.K. driver’s license to obtain a Spanish one—without taking the Spanish driving test. For those who’ve gone through the Spanish process, you know this is like getting a neuroscience PhD without dealing with all the classes.
🚋 And your complaint is? A Madrid commuter took to Twitter to complain that he had to wait a whole 8 minutes for the next metro to arrive. And the rest of the world said, if we only had it so good.
🥂 Bonus Round: 5 Things to Do This Weekend
Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Head over to Madrid’s Plaza Mayor this Saturday afternoon for a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade organized by the Band of Bagpipes Foundation of the Principality of Asturias. 300 bagpipers will march through Madrid before arriving at their final destination—the Royal Palace. Their goal is to mirror the many other green-themed celebrations in cities from Dublin or New York (so, cities with lots of Irish people). March 18, 5 p.m., Plaza Mayor de Madrid.
Saint Patrick’s Day Celebrations (i.e. drinking). Let’s face it, what most of us care about this weekend is where to drink green beer. So here are some very traditional (and very touristy) Irish bars in Madrid that will be celebrating. The Irish Rover in Tetuán is quite possibly the closest thing to Dublin’s Temple Bar in Madrid. If you don’t like to leave downtown, the James Joyce is conveniently located near the Puerta de Alcalá (you may get to see the Cibeles fountain lit up in green!). And O’Connell, near Sol, will be celebrating all night long. Click on the bars’ names for addresses and opening hours.
A night of Irish Music: If after a weekend of drinking you’re still in the mood for more, then Irish Treble may be exactly what you need. Four musicians and four dancers will showcase the best Celtic dancing has to offer in the live event “Viaje Celta” at Sala Galileo Galilei. “Viaje Celta”. Sala Galileo Galilei, Gaileo 100, Madrid. Sunday, March 19, 8:30 p.m. Tickets start at €12.
Bowie Taken by Duffy: The Exhibit. Few artists have been as influential to music and pop culture aesthetics as David Bowie. Luckily, Espacio COAM is hosting the world premiere of “Bowie Taken by Duffy”. In the exhibit, you’ll experience some of the iconic photo sessions the legendary British photographer had with iconic singer over a 9-year period. More than 150 objects from Duffy’s archive are displayed, along with video clips, large prints and never-before-seen interviews. Espacio COAM, Hortaleza 63, Madrid. Tuesday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Until June 25. Tickets: €14.90
Horteralia Festival. “Hortera” is a word that people use here to refer to something that’s tacky and tasteless. So why not create a festival celebrating the more hortera (but actually really cool) pop and rock music in Spain? This Saturday evening is your chance to wear your tackiest clothes and dance to the catchy tunes of iconic Spanish bands such as Ojete Calor, Nancys Rubias, Karina and more. Head over to the Horteralia Festival at IFEMA for a fun, non-Irish time. Recinto Ferial IFEMA, Pabellon 6. Avenida del Partenón 5, Madrid. Tickets start at €42.
🙏 Before you go, please remember to share this newsletter with your friends on social media. The more we grow, the more information we’ll be able to offer each week.
We’ll be back next week with more.