Costa Blanca Property For Sale In Javea, Moraira Luxury Villas » Property Spain €250k-€500k

New Build Property, 3 Beds, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:14:43 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5D
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1,000
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 406,751 Euros

Listing Price (€): 339,885
Floors: 1
Property Size (sq m): 199
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 405,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 290,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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New Build Villa, 3 Beds, 3 Baths, Garage [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:15:13 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5C
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 978
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From, 409,197 Euros

Listing Price (€): 333,270
Floors: 1
Property Size (sq m): 190
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 409,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 285,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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Javea Property, New Build, 3 Bedrooms, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:15:14 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5E
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 992
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 435,454 Euros

Listing Price (€): 359,835
Floors:
Property Size (sq m): 198
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 435,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 295,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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Javea Villa Sale, 3 Bedrooms, 3 Bathrooms, New Build [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:14:47 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5A
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1,014
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 431,435 Euros

Listing Price (€): 373,485
Floors: 1
Property Size (sq m): 201
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 435,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 320,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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4 Bed New Build Property, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:14:50 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M4I
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1,044
Bedrooms: 4
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 100 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 435.996 Euros

Listing Price (€): 344,190
Floors: 2
Property Size (sq m): 208
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 435,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 290,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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Property In Javea, Spain, 4 Bedrooms, New [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:15:17 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5G
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1000
Bedrooms: 4
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 417,129 Euros

Listing Price (€): 354,060
Floors: 2
Property Size (sq m): 202
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 417,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 295,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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New Detached Villa, Javea, 3 Beds, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:15:14 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M6A
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 984
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect, Country
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 431,932 Euros

Listing Price (€): 344,820
Floors: 2
Property Size (sq m): 196
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 431,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 295,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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New Build Property Javea, 4 Beds, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:14:21 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M4J
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1,043
Bedrooms: 4
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 100 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 422,921 Euros

Listing Price (€): 337,575
Floors: 2
Property Size (sq m): 202
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: 9m x 4.5m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 422,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 285,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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Javea Property Sale, New Build, 3 Beds, 3 Baths [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:19:13 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M4E
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 1,102
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect, Country
Pool Terrace (sq m): 100 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From 435,820 Euros

Listing Price (€): 370,335
Floors: 1
Property Size (sq m): 208
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 435,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 315,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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bank repossessions of property for sale in moraira alicante (1)

3 Beds, 3 Baths New Build, Javea [REPOSSESSION]

admin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:14:30 +0000

Repossessed Property In Javea Spain Details

Real Estate Ref No: BV-M5I
Year Built: 2008
Plot Size (sq m): 986
Bedrooms: 3
Views: Open Aspect
Pool Terrace (sq m): 80 sq m (approx)
Heating: Gas Central Heating (Radiators)
Reduced: From, 416,569 Euros

Listing Price (€): 327,495 (Lower Offers Possible)
Floors: 1
Property Size (sq m): 195
Bathrooms: 3
Pool: Rectangular 8m
Parking: Single Garage
Air Conditioning: -
Current Status: Repossessed - Foreclosed

About This Repossession In Javea

This property has been recently repossessed and is located on a brand new urbanisation with full, modern infrastructure and underground services on the outskirts of Javea. Already reduced from over 415,000 Euros, an offer of around 15% lower (approx. 280,000 Euros) than the advertised price is likely.

80% finance available – fixed rate, interest-only for 3 years. Please enquire for more details.

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Mediterranean seagrass could be hundreds of thousands of years old

Ian Sample — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:04:16 GMT

Seagrass plants alive today may have begun life in the late Pleistocene at the dawn of humanity

A sprawling meadow of seagrass in the shallows of the Mediterranean may be the oldest living organisms on Earth.

Scientists calculated the age of the plants from DNA tests on clumps gathered from the seafloor between Spain and Cyprus.

They revealed the typical age of the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica, to be thousands or tens of thousands of years old, though some appeared to more ancient still. A 15km-wide stretch of seagrass lying in waters off the Spanish island of Formentera could be 200,000 years old, the scientists found, dating it to the late Pleistocene and the dawn of humanity.

Until now, a contender for the oldest living organism was a Tasmanian seagrass thought to live more than 40,000 years.

P. oceanica is the most widespread seagrass in the Mediterranean, but populations are in global decline as the meadows are damaged by trawlers, coastal development and warming waters. In the past 100 years, seagrass has declined around 10% in the region.

The team of scientists led by Sophie Arnaud-Haond at the University of Algarve in Portugal describe their work in the journal, PLoS One. The researchers tested seagrass at 40 locations across the Mediterranean, separated by up to 3,500km.

Seagrasses spread by creating clones of themselves, leading to vast meadows of genetically identical plant life that can extend for tens of kilometres. The plants grow very slowly, taking over 600 years to cover around 80m of seafloor.

P. oceanica grows so large and lives so long because it has few native competitors and no major predators in the marine habitat. The extensive subsea meadows support some of the most valuable ecosystems on the planet.

Scientists hope that a better understanding of the giant seagrass meadows will lead to fresh ways to protect them from decline.

Ian Sample

Canary Island volcano delights scientists but upsets locals

Sandrine Morel — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:07:52 GMT

Newly formed underwater volcano offers scientific opportunities but has disastrous effect on island's fishing and tourism

The formation of an underwater volcano off the coast of El Hierro, the southern-most Canary Island, offers scientists a unique opportunity to study this process. But for the people of this tiny scrap of Spanish territory, whose livelihood depends on fishing and tourism, it is a disaster.

It all began in July 2011 when Spain's National Geographical Institute (IGN) noted a sudden increase in seismic activity. Then in October, an eruption occurred 2.4km from the coast at a depth of 300 metres, out to sea from La Restinga, at the island's southern tip.

"It is one of the few opportunities to monitor the birth of a volcano, before it even starts erupting," says Maria-José Jurado, a geologist at Spain's National Research Council.

But the repercussions for residents are far from good. After being evacuated in October, they are now in a state of "socioeconomic collapse", says a Socialist (PSOE) member of parliament.

"Since the evacuation ... we have been closed," says Sonia Lorenzo, owner of the local sub-aqua club. "And when the eruption finally stops we will have to wait several months before the wildlife reappears and we can resume diving." The waters off La Restinga attract visitors eager to see grouper, parrot and bird fish, moray eel and barracuda, as well as admiring the black coral and volcanic rock.

Authorities say fish have vanished from the area due to the release of sulphur and carbon dioxide, and the lack of oxygen. Fishing boats are staying in port, and visitors have vanished. Local B&Bs have closed and restaurants are deserted.

In just over three months the crater has spewed out almost 145m cubic metres of volcanic matter, and the top of the cone is now only 130m below the surface.

Scientists say the eruption is pumping nutrients into the environment, so sub-aquatic wildlife will gain the upper hand once the eruption stops. "The decline in seismic activity suggests that the volcano may have reached a certain level of maturity," says Jurado. "But there is no saying whether the eruption will stop tomorrow or in several years' time."

This article originally appeared in Le Monde.

Sandrine Morel

Antoni Tàpies obituary

Christopher Masters — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:01:11 GMT

Enigmatic artist who celebrated the most humble things

The distinguished Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, who has died aged 88, conceived of his work as a form of meditation on "the void" – more specifically, "that play of emptiness and fullness which composes everything and which reveals the meaning of nature". He expressed this esoteric philosophy, partly inspired by Zen Buddhism, through a multiplicity of potent, often paradoxical, objects.

In his "matter paintings", Tàpies mixed pigment and varnish with unconventional materials, including marble dust and sand, to create dense, wall-like surfaces that are both blank and teasingly mysterious. He also frequently included cruciform shapes that look less like Christian symbols than negative marks on a child's exercise book, the signatures of illiterate people, or even distortions of the artist's own initial. Clearly he relished the ambiguity.

Tàpies's achievement was to create highly intuitive, enigmatic images that have the potential to change our perception of reality, but defy reduction into a few lines of analysis. But then he was never working with his obituarist in mind. One of his earliest collages, from 1946-47, consisted of a cross made from paper torn out of a Catholic journal's obituaries page. He obviously did not have much respect for the genre.

Despite this elusiveness, it is still possible to outline a variety of themes and influences: leftwing politics and humanitarianism; the practices of Zen meditation, in which contemplation of a wall or a garden of sand can lead to enlightenment; the Christian concept of incarnation; and a conviction that art was a kind of alchemy or magic that could transform the basest materials. While some of these qualities can be traced to aspects of Tàpies's early life, the precise path that he took still has the potential to surprise and bewilder.

Born in Barcelona, Tàpies came from the Catalan intellectual elite. His father, Josep Tàpies i Mestres, was a lawyer with secular, nationalist sympathies who worked for the republican Catalan government during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. In contrast, his mother, María Puig i Guerra, was a devout Catholic, the daughter of a prominent rightwing separatist, who insisted on a religious education for her son throughout the upheavals of the period.

Tàpies's schooling did not have quite the desired effect. Apart from gaining a fear of nuns, he developed an idiosyncratic spirituality that was to influence his later work, although not in ways that were appreciated by the church. Even more important were the two years that he spent recovering from a lung infection contracted in 1940. During this period, he made copies of Van Gogh and Picasso, and read Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as the Japanese Buddhist Okakura Kakuzo – a varied list that weaned him from the conventional classicism admired by many older Catalan artists.

Compelled by his father to begin a law degree, in 1944 Tàpies also attended a drawing course at the Academia Valls in Barcelona, where his artistic aspirations were encouraged by the poet and critic Josep M Junoy. He spent the 1940s developing an idiom that was inspired partly by the "primitive" art of children and, more obviously, by Paul Klee and the surrealists. At times, he used Max Ernst's grattage (or scraping) technique, and he was also influenced by his friend Joan Miró, whom he met in 1948. In the same year, Tàpies co-founded the avant-garde Dau al Set group with, among others, the surrealist poet Joan Brossa.

Many of Tàpies's early drawings and paintings were self-portraits, which varied significantly in the liberties they took with his actual features. By 1946, however, he was already using one of the motifs that would become familiar: he began to create collages with crosses, using not just newsprint but scraps of toilet paper.

Tàpies's development was stimulated in 1950-51 by a French government scholarship to Paris, where he had a memorable encounter with Picasso and also briefly became interested in social realism. Despite these experiences, Tàpies was swiftly drawn to the lyrical abstraction known as art informel, especially after 1953, when he experienced the American equivalent, abstract expressionism, at the time of his first one-man show in New York.

This exciting period culminated in 1954 with Tàpies's marriage to Teresa Barba i Fàbregas, whom he had known since she was 16. The couple had a flourishing family life, much of it conducted at their country house in Campins, about 50km from Barcelona, which they acquired in 1960.

While Tàpies's exhilarating new style of "gashes, blows [and] scars" was undoubtedly very successful, eventually it evolved into something more serene and profound: "One day I tried to arrive at silence … Those millions of furious clawings were transformed into millions of grains of dust, of sand … A whole new landscape, as in the story of one who goes through the looking glass, opened before me as if to communicate the most secret innerness of things … And the most sensational surprise was to discover one day, suddenly, that my paintings, for the first time in history, had turned into walls."

As the artist's name means "walls" in Catalan, his adoption of this theme might seem particularly apposite. Yet in one of his most stimulating essays, Tàpies has associated this subject with such a range of contradictory experiences – from "separation, cloistering" and "the romantic prestige of ruins" to "quartered bodies" and "reflections for contemplation of the earth" – that its significance is anything but neat.

Nonetheless, all his "walls" and related imagery share one quality: a suggestion of something that lies beyond the material world but is only sensed in its absence. This point is made particularly clear in Spanish Arch (1961), with its elegant, blocked opening, but is implicit in much of his oeuvre, from the mysterious Metal Shutter and Violin (1956), one of his earliest assemblages, to the esoteric markings of Writing on the Walls (1971).

Furniture, whether real or represented, also became a key component of Tàpies's work. The bed took on a particular significance as an archetype connected with the beginning and end of life, a place of erotic excitement, warmth and death. Tàpies's vivacious handling of his materials was never more brilliant than in the crisp creases of Sheet Knotted with String (1971), while Rinzen (Awakening, 1993) incorporated an overturned hospital bed in a chilling installation at the Venice Biennale, partly made in response to the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Although much of Tàpies's art deals with universal issues, he never ignored his lifelong goals of democracy, social justice and self-determination for Catalonia. In The Catalan Spirit (1971) the red and yellow of the national flag are accompanied by frenetic, political graffiti, whereas Companys (1974) refers to the republican leader, Lluís Companys, who was executed by Franco in 1940. Both works are dominated by vivid, sanguinary stripes or splashes, while Roman Painting and Cap of 1971 includes a Catalan peasant's scarlet hat, suspended from a rope.

Tàpies did not confine his activism to his art. In 1966, he was detained and fined for attending a clandestine political meeting, and towards the end of Franco's regime he was involved in high-profile protests against the death penalty, for which he designed an unforgettable lithograph and screen-prints.

After the dictator died in 1975, Tàpies produced thoughtful and influential analyses of the role of "cultural workers" during that uncertain period. Soon afterwards, in 1978, he was able to publish his autobiography, Memòria Personal, which he had been writing for more than a decade.

Spain's return to democracy created significant new artistic opportunities. In 1983, for example, he completed a public monument to Picasso in Barcelona. Most importantly, in the following year he set up his own foundation, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, which moved in 1990 to a spectacular Modernista building in the city's Eixample district. As well as housing Tàpies's donations of his own work, this institution has an exhibition venue of international stature. It was here, on the occasion of the foundation's remodelling, that Tàpies made his last public appearance a year and a half ago.

In his later years, Tàpies's art remained as subtle and diverse as ever. He felt no need to divide his career into neat, marketable phases, but continued to experiment with a range of imagery and media. His figurative work included sculptures in terracotta, bronze and even repoussé metal, as in the eerie Metallic Profile of 1993. In 2000 he contributed to Encounters: New Art from Old, a group exhibition at the National Gallery in London that offered radical responses to the old masters. His offering was a characteristically earthy painting of the female body, giving particular emphasis to parts, such as the soles of the feet, that are usually ignored or even despised.

Above all, in such pieces as Homage to Matter (2006) he developed his essential themes: the spirituality of the material world, and the infinite value and mystery inherent in even the most humble things.

Two years ago he was given the hereditary title of Marqués de Tàpies by King Juan Carlos. He is survived by Teresa, and their children Toni, Clara and Miquel.

• Antoni Tàpies Puig, Marquess of Tàpies, artist, born 13 December 1923; died 6 February 2012

Christopher Masters

Heaviest snowfall in decades wreaks havoc across Europe

Angelique Chrisafis — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:16:22 GMT

Hundreds of people die in Arctic conditions across continent, with more than 120 reported dead in Ukraine alone

Freezing weather paralysed parts of central and southern Europe over the weekend, with Bosnia and Italy experiencing their heaviest snowfall for decades.

After more than 200 people were killed in Arctic temperatures in eastern Europe, the pattern of snowfall moved west, dumping two metres (6.5ft) of snow in parts of Bosnia. On Sunday, the authorities used helicopters to evacuate sick people and deliver food to thousands cut off by the country's highest snowfall on record.

More than 100 remote Bosnian villages were cut off by the snowfall. A state of emergency was declared in the capital, Sarajevo, which has been under more than a metre of snow since Friday, with schools closed, trams stuck in snowdrifts and people trapped in cars. With roads closed and no public transport in much of Sarajevo, some neighbourhoods reported water shortages and residents struggled to reach the shops to buy food.

In neighbouring Serbia, about 70,000 people remained cut off from services. Rare snowfall on Croatia's Adriatic coast left three dead, and the army was called in to help clear snow.

Ukraine had the greatest death toll with more than 120 people freezing to death, most of them at the end of last week, in temperatures that plunged to -30C at night. Most died from hypothermia or frostbite in the street. Bodies continued to be found, some buried in snow in remote parts of the country.

In Poland, the worst affected were homeless people. In Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, 16 people died owing to the cold weather. Most were from remote villages and were found dead at the side of the road or in unheated houses.

As the snow moved west, deaths were also reported in France. Two elderly people with Alzheimer's disease died after leaving home in the poor weather. One, an 82-year-old man from Moselle in north-eastern France, had left home in only his pyjamas. He was found dead just over half a mile from his home in temperatures that fell to -14C. France was bracing itself for a two-year high in electricity consumption as temperatures plunged to -20C in Reims and Mulhouse. On Sunday, the government warned French consumers to be cautious about energy use.

Meanwhile, Rome was paralysed by its heaviest snowfall in 27 years, which left buses struggling to navigate the icy roads and people stranded in cars for hours. The city's mayor was criticised over a lack of snow ploughs and salters. About 4,000 government-issued shovels were handed out in several main piazzas to Romans trying to clear their streets before a freeze forecast for Sunday evening. There were a handful of deaths in Italy due to the weather conditions, including a man in southern Naples found dead in his snow-covered car at the side of the road.

Snow also fell on Spain's Balearic islands in the Mediterranean, as well as Sardinia and Corsica. The Algerian capital, Algiers, saw a freak snowfall of at least 10cm, the first in eight years.

Even Greece was not spared from the vicissitudes of the continental weather system. An 80-year-old woman drowned and dozens more were trapped in flooded houses in the western city of Pyrgos after almost 15cm of rain fell overnight, the Associated Press reported.

• This article was amended on 6 February 2012. The original said people died from hyperthermia. In addition, the original photo caption referred to Burgos in Ukraine. These have both been corrected.

Angelique Chrisafis

Trial of judge Baltasar Garzón splits a Spain still suffering civil war wounds

Giles Tremlett — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:06:00 GMT

Nearly four decades after Franco's death, Baltasar Garzón, the man who wants the regime's crimes out in the open, is the only person in the dock

When Josefina Musulén took the stand in Spain's supreme court last week it was, at last, a chance to tell her family's tragic story to a panel of judges. Her pregnant grandmother, married to an anarchist, had been taken away by General Francisco Franco's fascist-backed rebels during the civil war. Her family was informed she had been shot. "They were told a bullet had been fired into her pregnant belly," she said.

It was only after Franco died in 1975 that fellow prisoners told them her grandmother had been kept alive until she gave birth to a baby girl. Josefina's family has spent 33 years hunting for her. "We looked under every stone in Aragón," she said.

Antonia Oliver, whose grandfather was one of tens of thousands killed and secretly buried by Francoist death squads, best expressed the wishes of those still seeking the graves of lost relatives. "My grandmother died and my mother is now 87," she told the same seven judges. "All I want is to close her wounds with truth and justice."

But that will not happen. Spain's courts are not interested in these families, their pain or their thirst for justice. They are not interested at all, in fact, in the festering wounds left over by a civil war and four decades of dictatorship.

Musulén and Oliver would like to have been in court to accuse their grandparents' killers. They were there instead to defend the only Spaniard to be tried because of Franco's repression – the investigating magistrate and human rights crusader Baltasar Garzón. His decision to open a court investigation into 114,000 deaths enraged fellow judges, may cost him his job and reveals Spain's inability to achieve closure for an uncomfortable, violent past.

It is the wound that refuses to heal. Too many died away from the front lines of the civil war and in the brutal, vindictive repression of the 1930s and 1940s. And too many people recall the casual, institutionalised repression that inspired the fear dictators need to stay in power. Where victims are no longer alive to raise their voices, children and grandchildren have done so instead.

Spain has travelled light years since Franco died, ending 40 years of stultifying dictatorship. A tacit agreement to forget the past was, to begin with, maintained by a mixture of ingrained fear and determination to build a secure future. But that agreement is in tatters. And this one, unresolved matter casts a shadow over the country's otherwise remarkable achievements.

Spanish courts, led by the indomitable Garzón, have pursued dictators, torturers and human rights abusers around the globe, pioneering a bold use of international law. They chase Nazi criminals, jail Argentinian torturers and even had Chile's former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, arrested in London. Yet crimes committed on their own doorstep are untouchable.

Pedro Solsona, whose father was tortured and killed after agreeing to feed some anti-Franco guerrillas in 1947, recalls a Captain Lobo who spread fear through eastern Castellón in the 1940s. "He would beat shepherds and stop halfway to smoke a cigarette," he told El País newspaper last week. "He wasn't big or strong, just full of hate."

One of the ironies of the Garzón case, in which a far-right group called Clean Hands accuses the magistrate of bypassing Spain's 1977 amnesty law, is that people like this are finally being heard in court. In the upside-down world of Spain's relationship with its murderous past, then, it is the investigator who is accused of committing a crime. Men like Lobo have never been placed in the dock. "We victims did nothing to turn the spotlight on them afterwards. Spain's reforms had absolved their masters. Would it have been right to pursue the servants?" the writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán once explained, referring to 1970s police torturers in Barcelona.

Garzón's failed attempt at opening a case against Franco and his henchmen nevertheless set out a devastating narrative for the 1936 rightwing military rebellion that sparked a civil war and toppled an elected government.

"The armed uprising of this date was planned and organised with the intention of bringing an end to Spain's form of government [and] attacking, detaining or physically eliminating people who held positions of responsibility," he wrote before the case was closed. Franco and his allies had carried out "the detention, torture, forced disappearance and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives... a state of affairs that continued, to greater or lesser extent, after the civil war ended".

This simple exposition of history is outrageous to some – especially those who never had to answer for their role as Franco servants and, sometimes, to their descendants. A decade has gone by since the first bodies were pulled out of the ground as relatives summoned the courage to dig up the mass graves left by Franco's death squads. The first exhumations were amateur affairs, involving guesswork, rumours and crude holes scooped out by borrowed yellow diggers. But they sparked something big. Ten years and 5,500 bodies later, they are sophisticated archaeological digs, with DNA testing and public funds to help.

In Poyales del Hoyo, a village in the central province of Avila, I attended the 2002 reburials of Pilar Espinosa, Virtudes de la Fuente and Valeriana Granada – whose roadside grave had been dug up in nearby Candeleda. It was a tense affair, with the rightwing mayor absenting herself for the day, but the bones were finally laid to rest in the village graveyard. "One lot finished and the next lot got started," the mayor, Damiana González, later told me, referring to rightwingers from her own family killed by the left at the beginning of the civil war. As I dug deeper into the matter for a book, Ghosts of Spain, I found some people still lowered their voices when talking about those times.

Late last summer, I received a call from Candeleda. Virtudes's relatives had asked to move her body to the family niche. A new rightwing mayor removed the bones of Pilar and Valeriana and threw them into the cemetery's communal grave. I drove past the roadside monument erected on the site where they had been shot on a rainy December night in 1936. It had been defaced with graffiti. They include the Francoist slogan "Arriba España" and the yoke-and-arrows symbol of the far right Falange, whose members killed the women. A backlash had started.

Part of Pilar's family had emigrated to Britain. One of her great-grandchildren, the translator Yash Gosain, has since moved back. He was furious when he discovered Pilar's remains had been tossed into a mass grave and a protest was called. But the historical memory movement has attracted elements from Spain's hard left, whose vision of the past is black and white. "We are the grandchildren of the workers you could not kill" read a provocative banner. When Gosain tried to explain the reason for the protest, he was shouted down by the mayor's supporters. Later he was attacked on the street.

Paul Preston of the London School of Economics, one of the great historians of Spain, has added facts to the debate with his book The Spanish Holocaust, published next month. Preston sees 200,000 people killed away from the battlefront, with Franco's regime killing 20,000 more afterwards. "The collective violence in both rearguards by brutal perpetrators against undeserving victims justifies the use of the word 'holocaust'," he writes. "Its resonances of systematic murder should be invoked in the Spanish case, just as they are in those of Germany or Russia."

When I went to see Clean Hands boss Miguel Bernad, a former secretary general for the neo-Francoist National Front, he said Garzón's refusal to investigate the killing of several thousand pro-Franco prisoners at Paracuellos del Jarama, near Madrid, proved his hatred of the right.

But an aching gap separates the victims of the "two Spains", immortalised by poet Antonio Machado in his line to newborns: "May God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart." The victims of leftwing excesses obtained justice from Franco's regime – which happily sent those responsible to the firing squad. Franco's victims have never had recourse to justice.

A new edition of Giles Tremlett's Ghosts of Spain is published by Faber on 5 April.

• This article was amended on 6 February 2012. The original said that Clean Hands boss Miguel Bernad is a former parliamentary deputy for the neo-Francoist National Front. This has been corrected.

Giles Tremlett

Three Britons die in legionnaires outbreak at Spanish resort

Giles Tremlett — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:41:41 GMT

British holidaymakers aged between 73 and 78 were among more than 20 people to contract disease at hotel in Calpe, Spain

Three British holidaymakers have died in an outbreak of legionnaires disease at a hotel in the Spanish resort of Calpe.

The three unnamed Britons, aged between 73 and 78, were among more than 20 people to have contracted the disease at the Diamante Beach hotel.

The deaths were confirmed over the last 24 hours, almost three weeks after Saga holidays was first informed of the outbreak at the four-star spa and convention centre.

The regional government of Valencia confirmed on Friday that the first death had been on 26 January and another had come five days later. The latest death happened at the Clinica Benidorm hospital on Thursday.

"The three dead were British and aged between 73 and 78," a spokesman said. A further 14 other people, ten of them British, were being treated for the disease.

Confusion surrounded the date on which the legionella outbreak had been confirmed, with Saga saying it was first told about it on 14 January.

The regional health department, however, said a preliminary test had failed to locate the bacterium that causes the disease. It did not publicly inform of the outbreak, which was confirmed by a second test, until Friday.

Authorities ordered the disinfection of the hotel's water system, but said Diamante Beach had not broken maintenance rules.

Saga said a further three people remain in hospital in Spain. Five other people who recently stayed at the Diamante Beach had been treated in hospital in the UK though all but one have been discharged.

"It was reported to us on Saturday 14 January that a customer who had stayed at the Diamante Beach hotel in Spain was being treated for pneumonia caused by legionella," a Saga spokesman said.

"When that happened we immediately sent out a scientific expert to Spain and informed our guests there and offered to move them to a different hotel.

"We also contacted people who had stayed at the hotel in the previous month telling them to contact their doctor if they were experiencing flu-like symptoms."

Health authorities said the hotel had now been temporarily closed. "With the closure we have a guarantee that there will be no more contagion and we can then evaluate the measures taken with the rigour required by the situation."

A spokesman for the hotel said it expected to reopen on Monday.

Saga said the company eventually moved all clients to a new hotel after their expert conducted tests on water samples.

A holidaymaker who died in his hotel room on 31 January had not said he was feeling sick and Saga had not originally known the cause of death, the spokesman said.

"This is clearly a very upsetting time for families and staff. We have sent extra people to Spain to support them in any way we can," the spokesman added.

Saga will be offering compensation to the holidaymakers who contracted the bacterium and has suspended sending clients to the hotel.

"We have done an inspection of the plumbing and made some recommendations to reduce possibilities of a further outbreak and they will need to make changes before we consider using it again."

The Foreign Office said it was providing consular assistance to those affected by the outbreak and their families.

Legionnaires' disease is caused by a bacterium usually found in standing water and can be contracted by breathing contaminated air.

Older people as well as those with weak immune systems or lung problems are most susceptible.

Giles Tremlett

Saving Spain's Socialists: ex-minister fights for control of a party in tatters

Giles Tremlett — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:28:28 GMT

Victory for Carme Chacón in leadership contest would set her on course to be country's first female PM

Spain's opposition Socialist party may set the former defence minister Carme Chacón on the path to becoming the country's first female prime minister at a nail-bitingly close contest for a new leader .

Chacón is in a two-way contest with the former deputy prime minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba to take over a party in tatters after a rout at elections in November.

Although both candidates worked closely with the former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Chacón is seen as closest to the man who governed Spain for eight years until December.

Zapatero has publicly declared himself neutral in the fight between the two career politicians, but is privately reported to back Chacón.

Rubalcaba, 60, has the open support of Felipe González, who was prime minister from 1982 to 1996. The wily veteran also has the backing of Patxi López, the popular Basque regional prime minister, and of many party veterans.

Chacón, a 40-year-old Catalan who studied part of her law degree at Manchester University, has called on the party's women to back her and appears to have the support of a younger generation of Socialists.

Her team are sure they have won enough pledged votes from delegates who have started gathering in the southern city of Seville for her to win. "She is going to get it," one of her team said.

But Rubalcaba's side also claims to be narrowly ahead in the battle for a majority of the 956 votes at the conference, with a block of up to 100 undecided delegates set to be key.

There is little difference, politically, between the two candidates. Both have veered further left since they were ejected from government in November, but neither belongs to the more rebellious wing of a party that competes for leftwing votes with the communist-led United Left coalition.

Higher taxes on the wealthy and support for the Tobin tax on financial transactions is mixed with a call for Spain to slow its austerity drive to prevent an even deeper fall into recession.

Spain's political system is mostly a two-party affair, with either the Socialists or the conservative People's party (PP) of the current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, running the government since 1982.

Whoever wins the post of secretary general can expect to challenge Rajoy for the prime minister's job at the next elections, which are due in late 2015 or early 2016.

They can also expect to preside over a fractious party that is bitter about losing power in Madrid as well as in many regional government and town halls.

The first major electoral challenge will be a vote for the regional parliament in the traditional socialist stronghold of southern Andalucía in March. Opinion polls there show the party in danger of losing to Rajoy's PP.

The task of turning around the Socialist vote is immense. It received its lowest overall vote since 1977 at the November general election, with just 110 MPs in the 350-seat parliament. Voters punished it for the economic crisis, massive unemployment and for Zapatero's 2010 U-turn on the economy. Rubalcaba was the candidate for prime minister at that election and Chacón campaigners point to his inability to stave off disaster.

Zapatero imposed austerity, raised the retirement age, froze pensions and cut civil service pay in May 2010 as bond markets put massive pressure on Spain's sovereign debt after the collapse of Greece and neighbouring Portugal.

It is still unclear how much the two candidates can distance themselves from Zapatero – especially as both were cabinet ministers when he performed his policy turnabout.

As opposition leader, they will shadow Rajoy, who has already performed his own U-turn by raising taxes as part of his attempt to cut back a budget deficit of more than 8% last year. With unemployment at 23% and still growing, many Socialists believe Rajoy will soon become vulnerable.

Spain has just entered the second phase of a double-dip recession, with the International Monetary Fund predicting the economy will shrink 1.7% this year. Many economists see the recession stretching into 2013, and Rajoy's embrace of greater austerity will also see more job losses.

The prime minister was recently caught on camera privately admitting that his planned reforms to the labour market, to be announced next week, would provoke a general strike.

Chacón's popularity leapt in 2008 when, aged 37 and seven months pregnant, she was appointed as Spain's first female defence minister by Zapatero. His second-term cabinet, with nine women to eight men, was Europe's first majority-female cabinet.

Giles Tremlett

Spain did not swing to the right, the left collapsed | Ignacio Escolar

Ignacio Escolar — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:19:32 GMT

Spanish voters felt betrayed by the left's response to financial crisis. Its future is tied up with the evolution of the economy

On 20 November 2011, Spain's Popular party (PP) won the general election with the most absolute majority ever won by the Spanish right in democratic times. The left collapsed. The Socialist party (PSOE) lost a third of its seats and 38% of its voters in its worst result since 1933. Of the 4 million voters to abandon the Socialists, only 600,000 did so for the United Left (IU) – a coalition led by the Communist party.

It is, without doubt, payback for the economic crisis; part of the same wave that has swept the majority of leftwing governments from power in Europe. Has the crisis caused Spanish society to shift to the right, or is it that the left has been stranded without discourse and without ideas? In truth, the answer is more complicated than these two oft-repeated cliches.

The election results reveal that the conservative absolute majority is not built on the unstoppable rise of the right. Mariano Rajoy, the new prime minister, won 10.8m votes in the November election, only 500,000 more than in 2008, when he lost to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Opinion polls do not show an ideological shift to the right either. According to the Centre for Sociological Investigations, the majority of Spaniards describe themselves as centre-left, ahead of right or centre-right. Rajoy's landslide at the polls was down to the abstention and break-up of the left, not the growth of his social base.

So what caused the electoral collapse of the Spanish left? It's a problem of supply, not of demand: in government the left was incapable of living up to the ideas and discourse of its voters. During the years of the property bubble, the PSOE embraced liberal economic policies, especially in terms of taxation. "Lowering taxes is of the left," Zapatero frivolously declared as he introduced numerous tax cuts that greatly benefited the upper classes. Then came the recession, and Zapatero was slow to react, lost in an absurd semantic debate about the word "crisis".

The point of no return came on 12 May 2010, when the prime minister, cornered by the pressure of the markets on Spanish bonds, announced the biggest public spending cuts in Spain's history. Instead of looking for a social democratic way forward, Zapatero utterly embraced liberal recipes to resolve the crisis. Instead of putting taxes for the richest back up, he cut workers' pay. Instead of tapping the profits of the banking sector, he froze pensions.

Did Zapatero have an alternative? There was without doubt space for other policies, even in the context of the austerity imposed from Europe. But how to apply policies of the left in the midst of the crisis, in a globalised economy and in a European Union where most states are governed by conservative parties? Zapatero's cuts were seen by a huge number of those who had elected him as an intolerable betrayal. Voters turned their back on the PSOE. If the only way out of the crisis was to support the right, then better the original than a copy.

The rigid institutional design of the EU, the European Central Bank and the euro – the only currency without its own treasury – has converted the countries of southern Europe into nations without economic sovereignty and indebted in a currency they don't control, as was Argentina with the dollar. Britain can devalue the pound or print more money: generate inflation and so reduce the weight of its debt. In Spain, without the peseta, it is people, salaries, the welfare state and workers' rights that are devalued.

The real problem is common to all the European left: the fiscal joy of the bubble years and national governments' lack of autonomy. The discourse is not wrong, but its application is impossible. There is no swing to the right, but the destruction of the left. It's not political theory but its practice. It cannot be true that the same welfare state that paid for (the recovery of) broken, ruined postwar Europe is today an unsustainable utopia.

The future of the left in Spain will depend on two things: its ability to ally the interests of the middle and lower classes, a tough challenge in a country frightened – the most pessimistic in terms of when we might emerge from the crisis, according to the Eurobarometer – and with 22% unemployment; and the evolution of the economy.

Rajoy has come to power as Spain enters a second recession, worse still than the first. No optimism is possible, at least for a couple of years. Despite the fear of the majority of the public, there will also be street protests – the 15M Indignados movement is there – and they will gather momentum if the penance of the cuts doesn't lead to paradise at the end of the crisis.

If the economy recovers, PP can look forward to a long period of hegemony that will only be broken if it makes serious mistakes. If the crisis continues, it's not impossible to imagine that Rajoy might serve only one term in office. But if the PSOE and the other parties of the left aren't able to win back the public's trust, the next Spanish prime minister could turn out to be a technocrat such as Monti or a populist such as Berlusconi.

Ignacio Escolar

Two British pensioners on Spanish holiday die of legionnaires' disease

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:06:24 GMT

Two men died after staying at hotel in Calpe, Valencia. Three more guests are still in hospital while six have been discharged

Two British holidaymakers have died after contracting legionnaires' disease while on holiday in Spain.

Two male pensioners died after staying at the Diamante Beach Hotel in Calpe, Valencia, Saga Holidays said. One died in hospital this morning while the other was found dead in a hotel room.

A further three people remain in hospital in Spain while another has already been discharged. Five other guests who recently stayed at the same hotel have been treated in hospital in the UK and all but one have been discharged, the company added.

A spokesman for Saga said: "It was reported to us on Saturday January 14 that a customers who had stayed at the Diamante Beach Hotel in Spain was being treated for pneumonia caused by Legionella.

"When that happened we immediately sent out a scientific expert to Spain and informed our guests there and offered to move them to a different hotel.

"We also contacted people who had stayed at the hotel in the previous month telling them to contact their doctor if they were experiencing flu-like symptoms."

He added: "Five people who had since returned to the UK had been to the doctors and were confirmed as having contracted Legionella. Four were discharged and one is still in hospital in the UK and responding to treatment.

"In Spain there were five people treated in hospital, one was treated and discharged and three are responding to treatment in wards.

"One gentleman was treated in the intensive care unit and passed away this morning."

Brussels discovers new €15bn black hole in Greece's finances

Larry Elliott, Katie Allen, Giles Tremlett — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:05:20 GMT

• Revelation raises pressure on stricken economy
• EU states to be asked for further financial help
• Ireland cuts growth forecast
• Spain demands banks raise €50bn in capital

Pressure on Greece's recession-stricken economy has intensified after international debt inspectors admitted an additional €15bn (£12.5bn) would be needed to fill a newly discovered black hole in the country's finances.

On a day when Ireland's government reduced its growth forecast and Madrid told Spanish banks to raise an extra €50bn to cover toxic assets, Brussels officials said European countries and state-owned banks would be asked for contributions to help Athens out of its fiscal troubles.

The fresh evidence of Greece's desperate financial plight came as it continued to discuss the terms of a deal with private sector creditors aimed at writing down debts by €100bn, and was an admission that the "haircut" being taken by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies would not be enough on its own to remove the risk of a default.

International Monetary Fund officials said that time was running out to finalise the negotiations in time to trigger payment of the next tranche of its €130bn bailout from the European commission, the European Union and the IMF.

The so-called troika has recognised in the past few days that Greece faces an impossible task in reducing debt when the economy is in such deep recession, and now accepts that the country's sovereign creditors will have to supplement the debt relief being provided by the private sector. Spending cuts, tax increases and the general uncertainty of the crisis have already pushed Greece into a slump, which in turn has eliminated many of the gains from the austerity measures.

Although China's premier, Wen Jiabao, raised hopes after talks with the German chancellor Angela Merkel that the world's fastest-growing emerging economy would consider boosting its contribution to Europe's bailout fund, there were fresh signs of strain in those countries most affected by the sovereign debt crisis.

Spain's finance minister, Luis de Guindos, ushered in a fresh round of consolidation when he told banks they had to make provision for bad loans and write downs in the country's troubled property sector.

With Spain falling into the second part of a double-dip recession and unemployment at 23%, de Guindos's new rules exposed the still dire state of the property market. Officials claimed it was the most ambitious attempt to cleanse banks' balance sheets in Europe. "Spain's banking system will emerge from this process stronger, with fewer but more solid banks," the economy ministry said.

Banks have absorbed large amounts of toxic assets as building developers default on loans in a country with a glut of 500,000 unsold new homes. They have already made provision for a third of the €176bn of "troubled" assets on their books, according to Spain's central bank.

Under the new rules total provisions against building lots, many of which are illiquid, will reach 80%. Those against ongoing building developments will hit 65%, while provisions against completed houses will reach 35%.

The measures show how developers, rather than mortgage-holders, became the biggest danger to Spain's banking system after politically controlled savings banks lent freely to them during a dizzying building boom that halted in 2008.

Many of those banks have already disappeared after a round of mergers that began in 2009. The fresh mergers will reduce the total even further, with all eyes now on Bankia, a troubled group formed from the merger of seven savings banks.

The country's bank restructuring fund will receive a €15bn top-up, though this will not add to the deficit. Banking reform was one of the major planks of a programme promised by conservative People's party prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who won November elections.

Meanwhile, Ireland's central bank slashed its growth forecast for 2012 from 1.8% to just 0.5%, blaming a slowdown in consumer spending and a tougher outlook for exports due to Europe's debt crisis.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny refused to accept the government's more optimistic budget forecasts were out of line with those from the central bank and claimed the real priority was creating jobs. "The government's growth figures are median figures and we are prepared to stand by those," said Kenny.

Market attention on Friday will focus on the US where the latest official unemployment data is expected to show further slight improvement in the job market.

While the unemployment rate for January is likely to stay at 8.5%, the world's largest economy is expected to have added 150,000 jobs. That is slightly below growth of 200,000 in December, however, with economists expecting seasonal layoffs of couriers after Christmas to knock job creation.

Data on Thursday reinforced a growing view the US labour market is slowly improving, with new claims for unemployment benefits falling more than expected last week.

US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke sought to reassure markets that there had been signs of modest improvement in the labour market, but conceded the pace of recovery was slow. Bernanke told Congress there were signs uncertainty dogging the US economy was letting up, but that the eurozone crisis still threatened the country's recovery.

Larry Elliott

Katie Allen

Giles Tremlett

Does Spain have the right to look at its past or not? | Miguel-Anxo Murado

Miguel-Anxo Murado — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:03:55 GMT

Star judge Baltasar Garzón opened an investigation into the killings of the Franco dictatorship. Now he sits in the dock

No habrá paz para los malvados. "No rest for the wicked". That's the biblically inspired title of a recently released Spanish thriller about crime and revenge. But in the real Spain, the wicked may be having some rest after all. While prominent corruption trials come to nothing, star judge Baltasar Garzón, seen all over the world as an embodiment of the principle of universal justice, sits in the dock, facing not one but three separate indictments that are expected to put an abrupt end to his hyperactive judicial career.

Garzón stands accused of opening an investigation into the killings of the Franco dictatorship (1936-1975). You may be surprised to learn that looking into these 114,000 murders is a punishable crime in Spain, but that is how it is. The specific charge against Garzón is "perverting the course of justice".

What Garzón did, at the behest of hundreds of relatives of people who were murdered during and after the civil war, was to open an inquiry to account for the tens of thousands of bodies still scattered around the country, secretly buried by their executors in ravines and ditches. For decades, their loved ones have tried to give them a proper burial. Some bodies have been retrieved with the help of volunteer archaeologists but the law is so fuzzy, and the attitude of many local judges so hostile, that only a fraction of the corpses have been unearthed. Spain continues to be a gigantic neglected graveyard. Garzón, who had helped with the investigation of similar crimes in Argentina and Chile, thought the same principles could be applied to Spain.

We're talking about non-natural deaths here, so the operation had to include a criminal investigation, which meant indicting Franco and his henchmen. When judge Garzón proceeded to do just that, even symbolically – they're all dead now – two far-right organisations sued, one of them the very Falange Española (the Spanish fascist party) which carried out many of the killings back then. Picture Radovan Karadzic successfully suing The Hague.

The fact that Garzón is facing two other charges (one an obscure corruption allegation, the other a rather technical misdemeanour in the handling of a corruption case) detracts from, rather than adds to, the credibility of the case against him. The timing seems all too suspect and the number of simultaneous accusations against a single judge unprecedented in Spain.

But if you think this means the Spanish justice system is still in the hands of ultraconservative judges and Francoist nostalgics you're missing half the picture, because only about half of them are. The other half hates Garzón for other, less ideological, reasons. Some of them have always resented his desire for prominence, or feel his reputation is undeserved. Socialist politicians never forgave him for going after the death squads that were set up in the 1980s to kill the armed Basque separatists of Eta. And he angered the conservatives too when he investigated a corrupt network affecting the now ruling People's party.

I'm not a Garzón fan myself, for my own reasons. I never liked his self-righteousness, and he represents an approach to justice I don't trust: that of the all-powerful judge with a mission. I believe that the ultimate guarantor of justice should be a clear law and not the mood or the idealism of a judge, and I guess Garzón is beginning to agree with me as he is becoming the victim of a confusing law and a few judges with a mission of their own: to put him out of business.

My personal feelings aside, I think there's more at stake here than his professional future, the petty quarrels of his trade or the intractable fuzziness of Spain's laws. What is at stake is whether we have the right to look into our recent past or not, and whether it is not the wicked, but the innocent, who will never be able to rest.

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Miguel-Anxo Murado

Treasure from sunken galleon must be returned to Spain, judge says

Giles Tremlett — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:03:50 GMT

US court says $500m of gold and silver coins recovered by US treasure-hunters from Atlantic in 2007 belongs to Spain

It is one of the greatest underwater treasure troves of all time, a glittering haul of gold and silver recovered from a mysterious sunken Spanish galleon and secretly flown across the Atlantic to the US.

But now an epic battle over ownership of 594,000 gold and silver coins scattered on the ocean floor has ended with victory for the Spanish government, with the American treasure-hunter Odyssey Marine Exploration ordered to send the valuable haul back home.

A jubilant Spanish government announced on Wednesday that the $500m-worth (£308m) of gold and silver coins found at a site that Odyssey called "Black Swan" would be back on Spanish soil within 10 days.

"This sentence gives Spaniards back what was already theirs," said the culture minister, José Ignacio Wert. "There is a space of 10 days in which the coins must be returned."

The court decision puts an end to nearly five years of intrigue on the high seas since Odyssey scooped the precious haul from the Atlantic seabed in May 2007. To the fury of Spanish authorities it secretly landed the trove in Gibraltar and flew it out in chartered aircraft to its base in Florida.

A American circuit court judge has upheld a decision by Atlanta judge Mark Pizzo, who had declared the trove came from the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by a British squadron off Cape St Mary, Portugal, in October 1804.

The judge rejected Odyssey's argument that there was no clear wreck site, with the coins scattered so widely it was impossible to say exactly which vessel they came from.

The treasure-hunting company, he said, had set out to find the Mercedes and had clearly done so.

Pizzo argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes' cargo of coins minted in Lima, Peru – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain's European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on the Mercedes.

Rightful ownership of the coins, which fill 600 barrels, now belongs to Spain and to descendants of the 250 Spanish sailors who were lost when the vessel blew up.

However, the whereabouts of a further 400,000 coins from the Mercedes remains a mystery.

The treasure was found by one of Odyssey's remote-controlled, deep sea robots as it scoured the seabed 1,100 metres down.

Odyssey's decision to use Gibraltar led to a tense stand-off in disputed waters off the rock. Shortly after the coins had been spirited off to Florida, a Spanish warship forced the company's 250ft Odyssey Explorer salvage vessel into the nearby Spanish port of Algeciras, while it was searched. Its captain, Sterling Vorus, was arrested, but later freed.

The Wikileaks release of state department cables revealed that US diplomats had offered to side with Spain against Odyssey. The US ambassador in Madrid sought to tie the treasure to attempts by an American citizen, Claude Cassirer, to recover a painting by Camille Pissarro that hangs in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemizsa museum.

"It was in both governments' interest to avail themselves of whatever margin for manoeuvre they had, consistent with their legal obligations, to resolve both matters in a way that favoured the bilateral relationship," Aguirre told the then culture minister, César Antonio Molina, in July 2008.

In contrast to its battles with Spain, Odyssey has done deals with the British government to recover and share sunken treasure.

An agreement to excavate a wreck thought to be the 80-gun warship HMS Sussex, which sank in 1694 carrying up to 10 tonnes of gold, led to complaints that a unique heritage site was being despoiled. The Sussex and 12 ships in its fleet sank in storms in 1694 while on a secret mission to bribe the Duke of Savoy to act as an ally in a war against Louis XIV of France.

"The whole arbitration process is still not one that gives us confidence in what ministers have told us, which is that the archaeological issues are paramount." said George Lambrick, director of the Council for British Archaeology, adding that serious concerns remained.

Neil Cunningham-Dobson, a British archaeologist who led initial examinations, denied the company would spoil the site: "Odyssey are one of the best and most reputable firms in the business and use the latest technologies."

Wert said some of the coins would be distributed to Spanish museums. "We want people to see them," he said.

He admitted the only stumbling block to the immediate return of the coins might be a further appeal by Odyssey, if it was accepted by a higher court and a suspension order placed on the sentence.

A spokeswoman for Odyssey, Laura Barton, indicated an appeal might be forthcoming. "Currently, there is no final order from the court to give the Black Swan coins to Spain," she told the Guardian without giving further details.

"It is certainly reasonable to assume that should the cargo recovered by Odyssey be transferred to Spain, it will never be returned," the exploration company had argued before the appeals court.

Giles Tremlett

Santander's UK profits plunge 40%

Jill Treanor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:40:25 GMT

Owner of Abbey National and Alliance & Leicester says it has not lent cash it has borrowed from the ECB to customers

Santander admitted on Tuesday that it was hoarding the cash it had borrowed from the European Central Bank rather than granting new loans to customers as it revealed that profits had fallen sharply as a result of troubled property loans.

In the UK, where the Spanish bank owns Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and part of Bradford & Bingley, profits were down 40% to just under £1bn. A flotation of the UK business, already severely delayed, now appears to be more than a year away as it grapples with an economy that is growing much slower than it had expected.

The bank, whose home country is on the brink of recession after contracting for the first time in two years in the final quarter of last year, reckons the UK economy will now grow by 0.6% in 2012, a cut in its original forecast for growth this year of 1.6%.

Provisions for bad loans of €3.2bn (£2.65bn) dominated the results of the bank, which is the biggest in the eurozone, and knocked profits 35% lower to €5.35bn. Even without the spin-off of the UK business, Santander has managed to raise the €15bn that European banking regulators had demanded it find to shore up its financial position for any worsening of the eurozone crisis.

Alfredo Sáenz, Santander's chief executive, said that the funds it had obtained from the ECB through its special liquidity operations had not been lent to customers. The bank was holding on to it as a "buffer", he said, which might disappoint the authorities who had been hoping the funds would be lent to individuals and small businesses.

Of the €3.2bn of provisions, some €1.8bn was intended to allow the bank to write-off up to 50% of the losses on repossessed properties compared with 31% a year ago. In total, the bank has €32bn of loans to the Spanish property sector which was booming before the 2008 banking crisis.

"The numbers have been greeted with relief that the bank is beginning to account for losses properly and insert a degree of realism in its figures," said Louise Cooper, markets analyst at BGC Partners.

"The fact that the share price actually rose on such a dismal set of results says a lot. Fears of massive bank writedowns and losses are still high in investor minds, so some acknowledgement of the problem helps sentiment. The new Spanish government wants its banks to clean up their loan books and take proper losses on real estate, so expect other Spanish banks to follow. The government also wants the banks to improve their capital positions without needing money from the taxpayer," she added.

In the UK, the contribution to the group was knocked by a £538m provision for mis-selling of payment protection insurance. As it warned the outlook for 2012 would be "challenging", the bank stressed it had met its targets under the Project Merlin deal with the government, lending £4.3bn compared with the £4bn required. Santander did not sign up to the provision on bonuses last year, which require payouts to be lower and the disclosure of the five highest paid staff.

Jill Treanor

Baltasar Garzón trial opens in Spain

Giles Tremlett — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:24:29 GMT

Spanish judge who had Augusto Pinochet arrested in London accused of abuse of power in investigating Franco-era crimes

Crusading Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón has told a court trying him for abuse of his powers that an investigation he opened into the deaths of 114,000 opponents of the Franco regime was based on the same principles used to order the arrest of Chile's Augusto Pinochet.

The judge was giving evidence as he faced charges of deliberately abusing his powers in order to open a formal court investigation into human rights crimes committed by dictator General Francisco Franco's regime between 1936 and 1975.

Garzón, who had a brief and controversial parliamentary career as a Socialist MP, denied he was motivated by political ideology.

He told a panel of supreme court judges he had simply been seeking the truth and looking after the rights of the victims and their families.

"There was no ideology in this, but there were thousands and thousands of victims whose rights had not been dealt with," he said.

Garzón faces being fined and struck off as an investigating magistrate for 20 years if he is found guilty in this trial, which is just one of three different cases against him going through the supreme court. He said his investigation into Francoist crimes was similar to those he carried out - backed by the Spanish courts - into human rights offences committed by Pinochet's dictatorship and Argentina's military juntas.

Garzón had Pinochet arrested in London in 1998 and the British courts accepted he could be extradited to Spain to face trial.

Among other arguments used by Garzón in the Pinochet case was that the crime of "disappearance" — when someone is taken away and never seen again — cannot be covered by amnesty laws as it is an ongoing crime of kidnapping that is still being committed today.

He used this principle in the Franco case as the bodies of many of the victims, which are believed to lie in secret mass graves, have never been found.

Garzón also brought a successful prosecution against an Argentinian navy captain, Adolfo Scilingo, who was jailed by a Madrid court for throwing drugged prisoners out of aircraft into the sea.

"I based myself on the Scilingo case from Argentina when accepting this investigation [into Francoist crimes]," he said on Tuesday.

Garzón said he had declined to open a separate investigation in the mass killing of thousands of prisoners of the leftwing republican government during the Spanish civil war because he did not think it was a matter for the national court to deal with.

"Garzón showed today that his decision to take up the investigation of the crimes of the Franco era was fully supported by international law," said Reed Brody, an observer from Human Rights Watch. " But the spectacle of a judge as a criminal defendant, having to justify his investigation into torture, killings and disappearances was itself an affront to principles of human rights and judicial independence."

A dozen relatives of Franco's victims are to give evidence during the trial, which is expected to last for weeks and has drawn observers from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Protests continued outside the courthouse on Tuesday, as victims, relatives and pro-Garzón campaigners complained he had become the victim of a concerted campaign of persecution.

Giles Tremlett

Pressure grows on EU leaders to relax strict austerity

Phillip Inman — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:49:15 GMT

Spain on course for another recession after GDP contracted 0.3% at the end of last year, while the cost of insuring Portuguese debt has hit a new record

Pressure on EU leaders to relax their insistence on strict austerity measures intensified on Monday after Spain revealed that its economy contracted in the last three months of 2011 and the cost of insuring Portugal's debt soared to a record high.

Spain's output dropped by 0.3% during the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the previous three months, according to official data, confirming the view of the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, that the economy is sliding into recession.

The figures followed unemployment data last week that shocked EU politicians after it revealed a 350,000 rise in the total out of work, taking the jobless rate to 22.8% and above 5 million.

Madrid said it wanted officials in Brussels to discuss how countries such as Spain can grow before any agreements are reached on further austerity measures.

The economy is expected to slide further in the first quarter of this year, placing Spain in its second recession in less than three years. A technical recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction.

The figure announced by the Spanish statistical office, INE, broke a run of seven quarters without economic contraction.

Compared with a year earlier, gross domestic product rose 0.3%, the INE said. For all of 2011, it increased 0.7%.

Portugal's slide towards a Greek-style second bailout accelerated after its principal private lenders indicated that they were growing weary of assurances from Lisbon that it could get on top of the country's debts.

Business and consumer confidence also hit record lows, following a string of pay cuts and across-the-board tax hikes that were part of Portugal's painful austerity programme.

Banks and others offering insurance against default to holders of Portuguese sovereign debt have begun demanding huge payments upfront rather than allowing costs to be spread over the term of the contract. This means that it costs €3.95m (£3.3m) to insure €10m in bonds over five years, payable now.

Analysts said that this made Portugal the second most costly sovereign debt to insure in the world, after Greece, and implied a huge lack of confidence in market circles about Lisbon's future.

Portuguese bonds have come under particularly intense pressure from investors after Standard & Poor's downgraded 15 eurozone countries earlier this month, putting Portugal in the "junk" category.

Portugal's 10-year bond yields surged on Monday to just under 16%, more than twice the level that is generally considered unsustainable.

John Higgins and Ben May, economists at Capital Economics, said Portugal would be forced out of the single currency, probably next year. Capital Economics has already predicted Greece will leave in 2012.

"The surge in yields in Portugal, which has taken place since the country's credit rating was lowered to sub-investment grade earlier this month by Standard & Poor's ratings agency, reflects growing scepticism that private-sector involvement in eurozone sovereign debt restructurings will only be applied in the case of Greece," they said in a report.

Business and consumer confidence nudged higher on average across the EU despite the fall in Portugal, though analysts were hard-pressed to explain why sentiment had improved this month against a backdrop of huge anxiety while negotiations continued in Athens over the fate of Greece and talks over closer fiscal unity were undermined by Britain's use of its opt-out.

UK consumer confidence rose, according to the Mmarket research firm GfK NOP, though it remains "seriously depressed".

Nick Moon, managing director of GfK NOP Social Research, said falls in inflation and energy prices were behind the rise. He said the feel-good factor may return with added strength with the arrival of the Olympics and the Queen's diamond jubilee, which could improve expectations for the economy and people's own finances.

Phillip Inman