Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

23/05/12

MORE FROM SPAIN. IT’S DIFFERENTIt has been a quieter couple of weeks for me but even so I have been busy every day. Spain has continued to be the whipping boy of the World markets and the Spanish government continues to stand like a rabbit in the headlights doing nothing because they haven’t got a clue what to do.

So this week we have a lot of stories taken from the writers in the Facebook group of writers and bloggers about Spain, we have a guest post placed on Culture Spain by someone considering moving to Spain with thoughts about what he should be doing when he comes here. We take a look at social media in the Canary Islands and how it could be used to compete in a global market for tourists and of course we have the awesome story of the Athletic Bilbao fans who chartered their own flight and finished up further away from their destination than they would have done if they believed that Ryanair actually landed somewhere near their purported destinations. Oh and the picture above? Forest fire in the background near Montroy.

Remember too that if you would like to contribute something, make comments, participate in any way or you have a blog or website you want me to look at then just get in touch on grahunt@gmail.com and tell me about it. Happy to take a look at suggestions and ideas as well as your content.

I read a lot of stuff online about Spain and much of it is very interesting and i think it will interest you too. The people who are on my newsletter get a whole lot more. To get first look then you should visit this link.

IT’S BUCHAREST STUPID!

Spain Is DifferentSQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18

Leaving A Geographical

Illiterate To Book The Flight

So, after many years of trying your club gets to the final of a European competition and you decide that your “Peña” (Supporters Club) will charter a flight and support the boys.

You put one of your mates in charge of the arrangements and sit back waiting, excited to think of seeing your team represent you in the final of the Europa League.

However you overlook one little thing. Bucharest is in Romania. Budapest isn’t. They are actually two separate cities in Eastern Europe but unfortunately they are not next to each other.

Check out the full story here.via @thomasmconn

Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

Gone Fishing In The Wrong Pond

On the Entrepreneur Solo blog I put up a post earlier this week about fishing. It refers to my real estate business but can be applied to any business in general. How can you apply it to yours and what do you think?

The last five months have been rather hectic in my property businesses,Valencia Property and Houses for Sale in Spain. While the Spanish economy burns around me and I have been asked many times by other agents how are you doing it? How are you so busy and making sales while we are sat around wondering when the next client will walk in through the door? About 80% of Spanish Estate agents have closed down and more are closing on a weekly basis as the harsh reality of a market that has contracted greatly since the boom days of the early 2000′s were around. To answer this we need to go back to the Pareto Principle I talked about here and look at the 80/20 rule again.

So how do I do it and how can you do it too if you are involved in Spanish property? It is called fishing in the right pond of course.

Read The Rest Here

23/05/12Spain Is DifferentSQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18

Chris Nation is contemplating moving to Spain. He has been here a few times on recon missions and likes Valencia a lot. He has written a post for Nick at Culture Spain telling what goes into the decision. As a natural raconteur Chris goes off topic quite a bit in this but that is what makes the article excellent.

Some background might be useful in explaining my connection with Spain and thereby the decision process that I am going through (do I move now or wait and what makes Spain so attractive?):

My first experience of Spain came in 1961. The headmaster of my prep school, seeing that no little oiks were due to take exams to move up to the next level of education in the Easter term, took the opportunity to move the whole lot of us to a ‘motel’ on the beach 2 kms south of Estepona. There we spent ten weeks in Andalusia before the Cost del Sol was invented. I was 11 years old.

Estepona in Jan ’61 was a village with no hotel, where fishermen built boats by hand on the beach and young men doing mili (military service) would be posted to sit in lonely solitude on the bluff overlooking the foreshore, guarding Spain from Moroccan smugglers and girls in bikinis. We used to go up there to ‘chat’ – neither party understanding the other – except when we managed to badger a lad into loosing off a shot into the sea. How he accounted for the absent round and the fouled bore of the rifle was his business.

This adventure – and it was certainly an adventure, complete with coverage by the British press – is another story but I guess a great deal of  the essence of Spain was taken in, along with the wine [oh yes!] the Friday-killed Saturday-grilled pork, football against the local school, flamenco by the village girls and the bull fights at Malaga.

When I’m asked, “Where were you when Jimi died, man”? I say, “Estepona,Spain, man”. By this time, hotels and apartments had appeared but the town council had, with great forethought, kept the developments on the landward side of the coast road by building an attractive paseo maritimo on the seaward side.

A trip to Barcelona on location for Coca-Cola in 1982 brings back the memory of Gaudi and almost being trampled underfoot by Diego Maradonna and his minders. We were going in opposite directions, Maradonna at a run, through the doorway of our hotel. My boss, from Brooklyn, said “Diego who?”

It was also interesting for the fact that, with the Falklands war in progress, here I was, an Englishman at a restaurant table in Spain with an Argentinean and an American. All was amity. It was at that meal that our waiter stopped for a moment while I was hacking into the pan boli and announced, “He eats like a Spaniard.” I’ve always liked that. If someone says, “Why Spain?” I can say, “Because I eat like a Spaniard.”

Read the rest of Chris article at Culture Spain

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO

Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

Why Spain Will Inevitably Leave

The Euro

Edward Hugh is a respected blogger about the economy. He is relentlessly peesimistic about the economic situation that Spain finds itself in and the lack of good leadership that may lead it out of the problems it has (Possibly totally correctly) He put together an article last week about two reasons why Spain will leave the Euro. It’s a long read but a good one and it clearly puts his case as to why Spain leaving the Euro is inevitable eventually.

My question to you is what do you think? Will the periphery countries of the Eurozone leave the Euro or will they limp along until the German cavalry comes to help in the form of Eurobonds and printing money to give a temporary respite?

Take a look at Edward’s article here.

More bad economic news this week meant that Spain now has to pay totally unsustainable rates for borrowing money on the World markets meaning that paying that money back is getting to be more and more difficult.

The “hidden” debt in Spain is now also coming to the surface with the regional governments stating their real debt positions, Madrid overshot their deficit forecast by 100% last year for example. However as the protestors at the anniversary of the Indignado movement reminded us last week, austerity just isn’t working at all. The more cuts there are the worse the situation gets for the average person in the street.

CANARY ISLANDS SOCIAL MEDIA

Robotic Fish Shoal To Sniff Out Pollution in Harbours. A new project in Gijón aims to catch the boats that pollute the waters using yellow robot fish.

Alex on the Canary Islands takes a look at what it will take the the Islands to stay at the forefront of tourism promotion using social media

There is currently a lot of talk about the need for the Canary Islands to cultivate the loyalty of their visitors. The debate however, has to a large extent missed the point. It has focused only on what we can do while our tourists are in the Canaries. The hugely important subject of how to stay in touch and build loyalty once they have gone home has been ignored. 

With Canarian tourism now in its sixth decade, customer service and amiability should be second nature. Rather than pinning all our future hopes on smiling a lot and providing good customer service, we need to move the debate towards what happens once our visitors have left the islands. In short, we need to stay in touch with our visitors and make sure that they come back.

In the past the Canary Islands attracted tourists with large outbound marketing campaigns in magazines, on television, and in travel agencies. Travel agencies and tour operators then rounded up the tourists and sent them on down to the islands. There has never been a permanent relationship between visitor and destination.

“A recent article in Canarias 7 stated that it costs five times as much to attract a new visitor than to bring back a previous one”. 

The internet, and specifically social media, now gives us the ability to stay in contact with our visitors once they have gone home. We now have the tools to build positive and permanent relationships with everyone who has visited, or is thinking about visiting the islands.

Social media allows us to share beautiful images, interesting information and engaging videos every day. By providing our visitors with a regular reminder of the highlights of the islands we can build a community of loyal fans who act as voluntary advocates for the islands.

“Social media reach: The Gran Canaria Info Facebook page has over 2,500 fans and reaches 10,000 people per week. That is 10,000 people who see attractive images and videos of Gran Canaria each week: Over half a million people per year!” 

Read More Here

Daily Mail talking rubbish again in a story about people handing their keys back to the bank supposedly. Well it ain’t that simple people!

Spain’s famous four day weekends are under threat of getting canned by the austerity measures next year. That would be sad of course.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009Sound Of Today 23/05/12Spain Is DifferentSQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18

Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

Getting a NIE Number in Spain

If you are coming to Spain you need a NIE number, a tax identity number in effect. The system changes constantly but you might not know that it is actually totally feasible to get one without setting foot in Spain. (However I would always suggest a visit to do it) Take a look at this post on Iberosphere to know more about the process from

TAKING SOME TIME OUT BY THE PORT IN

VALENCIAIt was my first time on a Catamaran and it was a good one. Having lived in Valencia for thirteen years, gone through the whole America’s Cup thing, had clients with boats specifically coming to Valencia because of the mooring possibilities for their boats and often watched the party boats going out from the port while having a coffee overlooking the Port it was a surprise to realise that I had never actually been out of the Port on a boat.

Therefore the opportunity to go and celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday with a Champagne Catamaran tour from the port followed by a meal at one of the excellent restaurants overlooking Valencia harbour was too good to be missed. And this is why there are plenty of shots of boats, the sea and masts an stuff in the magazine this week.

Relatively inexpensive a couple of hours on the ocean waves is a good way to spend a pleasantly warm Saturday evening in Valencia. Just don’t drink too much champagne early on in the trip or you might finish up a bit green around the gills.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In Spain The Jobless Find A

Refuge Off The Books

The New York Times puts together some excellent reports on Spain. This week they put out a story about the black economy in Spain in which they suggest that if it were not for the black, or underground, economy then Spain would be in a situation of violent social unrest due to the extremely high unemployment and lack of positivity about the future for many people, especially the young.

It is a very good article and well worth a read. On a similar note I wrote about this last year on Entrepreneur Solo. It was the second in a series of posts about the situation of the economy in Spain and included the following: “The proof. Well anecdotally there is a small town in Andalucia where everyone is officially unemployed now apparently yet spending in the local area has remained constant from 2008 to now. ie money is still there but it is just not as visible as it used to be.”

I followed the story up earlier this year when a report to the Cadena Ser radio station suggested that up to 23.3% of the economy in Spain was in B.

And last year I did an extremely depressing post about why the black economy is huge in Spain here.

Is there any solution to this? Well yes. In a series of posts earlier this year I proposed a lot of changes that would help people actually declare their earnings. The Battle For Spanish Society and the follow ups were essentially positive pieces with some suggestions to make the situation better. I don’t see any progress yet though and I am not holding my breath.

23/05/12Spain Is Different

SQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18

Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

DOING BUSINESS IN

SPAIN

Every year a new ranking of the ease of doing business in countries is brought out by the website Doing Business. Spain invariably fares pretty badly. However this year the country has excelled itself.

Now ranked 133 out of 183 countries surveyed for the ease, or lack of it, of opening a business. Spain is on a par with Rwanda for the ease of doing business. Yes, in the country where genocide has recently taken place and about 16% of people were killed in an internecine, ethnic war it is just as easy to open and run a business as it is in Spain! Actually opening a business is much easier in Rwanda it is in position 8 on a world level!

Spain fares better than last year though as on this particular point it was in position 148 last year!

Overall Spain is in position 44, up from 45 last year in the ease of doing business. So excellent work from the business positive new government there ;-).

Overall it isn’t a great survey for Spain. Take a look at the page and click through to the rankings and more information. A very interesting read.

Some strange stories come out of Spain every week and this week has been no different. A selection of stories that have appeared this week in Spain to delight and confuse you.

Firstly Think Spain reports that the Mayor of a small town near Madrid has offered people the chance to get a free suckling pig, Cochinillo, for anyone registering their residency in the town. He explains that imagination has to be used to stop the trickle of people moving out of the town. I just have three questions here; 1: Is that the limit of his imagination!! 2) Shouldn’t they have thought of it earlier? 3: Why does a town of 24 people need a Mayor?

This feature on the top 10 nudist beaches in Spain should give you some scope if you want to get your backside burnt while lying down for too

long in the sun, not to mention other delicate parts. Got to say the guy in the picture looks particularly pleased with himself, but then again he isn’t nude!

Also in the news this week, the fact that the DGT will give you an extra point on your driving licence if you haven’t had a fine in the last five years. The points driving licence in Spain now gives you up to 15 points rather than the original 12. Funny thing is that the report states that “only” 19% of drivers have lost points in the first five years of the points licence. I would have thought that figure to not merit an only!

And finally for this week there is some good news on the unemployment front, at least if you are a Nigerian woman who is heavily pregnant. There are so many unemployed now that if your waters break in the unemployment office you can be virtually guaranteed that a doctor will be around to perform the delivery for you. This story from Typically Spanish shows you what happens.

Is The Sun Setting on Spain as a Brand? This rather controversial and simplistic analysis of Spain appeared in El Pais. Can’t say I agree as it was never a real brand

Lord Sugar sees his patience wearing thin with Aifos the owners of a hotel he has supposedly bought in Mijas. Or has he?

Esperanza Aguirre proving once more that she is an absolute idiot and understands nothing about the mentality of crowds. Don’t whistle or the Cup Final will be stopped

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009Sound Of Today 23/05/12Spain Is DifferentSQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18

Fancy A Suckling Pig Just For Going To Live In A Village With Just 24 Residents?

Curated by Graham Hunt (Co-Author of Laptop Entrepreneur)

ON A BOAT

SUNSET

BLOOMING

Some more images from Valencia over the last couple of weeks. If you have any you want to share then feel free to send them to us and we may well use them in the magazine.

ASTURIAS

VALENCIA HARBOUR

VELAS Y VENTS BUILDING

STAIRS IN VALENCIA

And that is all for this edition of Spain is Different magazine. Hope you liked it as normal and if you

did share it with your friends. The more readers the better.

I read a lot of stuff online about Spain and loads of it is very interesting. The people who are on my newsletter get a whole lot more. If you want to sign up too then visit this link. You can also get older copies of the magazine there. The first seven are linked up. I am not promising that the magazine will be every week, I may leave it two weeks now and again depending on the stories that come in (Although so far I have managed to do it on a weekly basis)

Just put in your name in the first box and your mail address in the second to receive updates. Every week or two we wi l l send you the lates t newsletter as soon as it comes out. (You will also get other stuff related to Spain and updates to the magazine but you a re guaran teed the newsletter)

Also if you have photos that you want featured in the magazine or you have an article you want featured just send it to me at grahunt@gmail.com and I will take a look.

MORE IMAGES OF SPAIN THIS WEEK

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009Sound Of Today23/05/12

Spain Is DifferentSQUEEZING THE JUICE FROM THE ORANGE / ISSUE 18