A 60-year-old Spanish man who claims to be desperately lonely and suffering from serious health problems has been trying to be let into a state prison, because he doesn’t want to commit any crimes. Justo Márquez, a 60-year-old from Granada, Spain, has been standing outside the Alhaurín de la Torre Prison in Malaga for days, hoping to be allowed inside. He has been photographed holding a sign that reads “I want to go to prison” and he told journalists that he has already met with the prison warden who has so far denied his voluntary incarceration. Márquez, who reportedly suffers from cancer, depression, anxiety, and heart problems, said that he is desperate to “stop being lonely 24 hours a day,” and that prison is his best option to do that. Read More »

A Spanish restaurant recently paid 30,000 euros ($32,800) for a 2.2kg (4.85 lbs) piece of handmade cheese, thus setting a new world record for the most expensive piece of cheese.

Every year, in the last week of August, the town of Las Arenas de Cabrales hosts a contest where the best pieces of Cabrales cheese are auctioned off to the highest bidder. This year, Llagar de Colloto, a restaurant in Oviedo, Spain, paid a whopping 30,000 euros for a piece of Cabrales cheese made by hand from cow and goat milk and matured for several months in a cave in Los Picos de Europa mountains. Made by the Los Puertos cheese factory from Poo de Cabrales, the 2.2kg piece of cheese was selected by the jury as the best of the cheeses of fifteen producers who participated in the contest and was the most coveted in the subsequent auction.

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Fed up with tourists who only come in to check out the scenery, the owners of Queviures Múrria, a centennial grocery store in Barcelona, have put up a sign announcing a 5 euro fee ($5.6) for coming in just to look. Queviures Múrria has been in business since 1898 and is one of the most eye-catching locations in all of Barcelona. The vintage look of the store and the traditional design of the interior draw in hundreds of tourists every day, but the problem is that many of them aren’t actually interested in the products sold inside – all kinds of traditional Spanish cured sausages, cold cuts, cured cheeses, oils, wines, etc. According to one of the managers, many tourists enter the store without even muttering a simple ‘hello’, wander around taking pictures, and then simply leave without buying anything. So he decided to charge people for ‘just looking’ just to discourage them. Read More »

A Barcelona man was sentenced to one year in prison after a court found that he had been terrorizing his neighbors for at least 5 years by playing loud electronic music almost non-stop. A court in Mataró (Barcelona), Spain recently ruled against a man who had reportedly been driving his neighbors crazy by playing electronic music at a loud volume. The nightmare of the man’s neighbors began 2012, when he started playing his unbearably loud music all day and night. Despite repeated requests to turn the volume down, as well as visits from the local police, the man refused to comply and people had no choice but to put up with it. In 2015, 3 neighbors who lived in a house attached to that of the accused filed a complaint against him, after having endured nearly 3 years of electronic music at full volume. They claimed that the constant banging music was causing them both physical and mental issues. Read More »

After meeting as adults, two step-brothers who shared the same father hid their romance from the world for nine years. Now they’re making their relationship public so they can get legally married. Ana Parra was 20 years old when she met her step-brother Daniel (17) for the first time. Her mother had told her that her biological father had started a new family and had another child, which sparked her curiosity. She looked for her father on Facebook and that’s how she discovered Daniel’s profile. She started a false account and befriended him on the social network. They started messaging each other, discovered that they had very much in common, and Ana ultimately confessed that she was his step-sister. They decided to meet in person, gradually became good friends and then that friendship grew into something more… Read More »

A Spanish court ruled that an electrical company was wrong to fire one of its electricians for allegedly drinking more than three liters of beer on the job because it couldn’t prove he was drunk. Drinking alcohol during work hours is usually frowned upon and can constitute grounds for dismissal, but according to a high court in Murcia, Spain, that is only true when the employer can prove without a shadow of a doubt that the accused was inebriated to the point where he could no longer fulfill his duty safely. The court recently ordered an electrical company to either reinstate the sacked worker or pay them 47,000 euros ($52,000) for failing to show that their drinking on the job left them inebriated, intoxicated or drunk”, or unable to do their job. The controversial ruling also mentioned that the company failed to consider the hot Murcian summer, which apparently justified beer consumption. Read More »

A Spanish sewer worker developed a roundworm infection so bad that doctors could see the larvae crawling right under his skin. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published the unusual case of a 64-year-old sewer treatment employee from Spain who realized that something was wrong with him after experiencing mild diarrhea and itching all over his body. He reported to the University Hospital in Madrid where doctors diagnosed him with a parasitic roundworm infection that had become unusually serious. Strongyloides stercoralis infection is usually asymptomatic, but in this particular case, it had become so serious that doctors could see the worms crawling under the man’s skin. Read More »

In order to prevent his drunken son from getting behind the wheel of his BMW and possibly causing an accident, a Spanish man vandalized the vehicle, smashing the windows and denting its metallic body with a pickaxe. A father’s love for his children is usually very strong but it can manifest in unusual ways. Take this story of a 60-year-old man from Logroño, Spain, who went to extreme lengths to make sure that his inebriated son doesn’t get behind the wheel of his black BMW and potentially cause a tragedy. Last week, local police received calls about a man vandalizing a vehicle parked on a public road in Logroño by smashing it with a pickaxe. A squad driving toward the reported location of the incident, noticed a white van fleeing the scene and managed to pull it over. Inside were an elderly man and a visibly drunk younger passenger. Read More »

Fernando Cuevas, a Spanish priest from the city of Valencia, has been dubbed the “Tinder Priest” because of his impressive matchmaking record – 270 marriages and no divorces. Father Fernando’s matchmaking career began 14 years ago. he was walking with a young practicing Catholic man named Salva, when he was approached by a group of young women. Impressed by the beauty of the girls and knowing that they shared his Catholic values, Salva asked the priest to play matchmaker and introduce him to one of them. Five months later, Salva married one of the girls, Geles, a Fine Arts student, and Fernando Cuevas’ career as “Tinder Priest” began. He has been taking his role as a matchmaker for practicing Catholics very seriously ever since. Realizing that Western society was becoming increasingly secularized, and that practicing Catholics were finding it difficult to meet romantic prospects who shared their core values and beliefs, Fernando Cuevas took it upon himself to help them. Read More »

A Spanish woman recently lost a court battle against the company that fired her for allegedly posting twerking videos on TikTok while on paid leave of absence due to severe back pain. The Superior Tribunal of Justice in Spain Castilla y Leon region recently upheld a supermarket’s decision to fire a cashier over a series of TikTok videos that were deemed “incompatible with her ailments”. The woman, referred to only as ‘Mrs. Piedad’ in the court papers, was reportedly an employee of Semark AC Group SA, the company behind the Lupa chain of supermarkets in Spain. She had been with the company since 2006, but at the end of January 2021 she went on an extended paid leave of absence, claiming that she was dealing with serious back problems. Her TikTok account said otherwise, though… Read More »

Pheasant Island is a tiny island on the border between Spain and France that alternates ownership status between the two countries every six months. Located on the Bidasoa River, the natural border between Spain and France, Pheasant Island is a deserted patch of land with a rather fascinating history and political status. It might not look like much today, but hundreds of years ago it was where the Thirty Years’ War between Spain and France finally ended. The two countries sent a couple of their most important dignitaries to the island to negotiate, with their respective armies gathered on both sides of the Bidasoa, in case things went wrong. 11 years and 24 summits later, a deal was struck, and Pheasant Island became the world’s smallest condominium, under the joint sovereignty of the two nations. Read More »

A Spanish law school teacher recently shared one of the ingenious methods that one of her students used to cheat on an exam –  a dozen of artistically etched BIC pens. Yolanda de Lucchi, a teacher at the University of Malaga, in Spain, recently shared a couple of very interesting photos on her Twitter account. She was apparently cleaning up her drawers when she came across one of the more ingenious cheating methods she and her colleagues had confiscated. A few years back, one of her students tried to cheat on an exam by finely etching the Criminal Procedural Law onto eleven BIC pens. A close-up of the pens really showcases the skill of the student, who obviously put a lot of time and effort into his intriguing cheating technique. Read More »

Spanish authorities recently arrested a man who had apparently admitted to the driving offenses of nearly 100 people for money, in order to keep their record clean. The Civil Guard of the Balearic Islands in Spain announced that it has discovered an Armenian man who was advertising a rather unusual service online. The unnamed man was offering to take the blame for strangers’ driving offenses and help them keep their records clean in order to retain their driving licenses and avoid paying fines. Of course, he changed money for his service – between 75 and 200 euros per point deducted from his own driving license – and business was booming. Read More »

A wanted prison escapee dubbed the “Galician Rambo” eluded capture by hiding in the forests of Galicia since March of 2021. Alfredo Sánchez Chacón, a Spanish ex-military and survival expert, was sentenced to hard time in prison for shooting and killing a 24-year-old man in 1996. Back then, authorities spent months combing the forests of Galicia and hunting him down, but they eventually captured the wanted man. Then, during the murder trial, Sánchez Chacón escaped Vigo prison by using a brawl between other prisoners to climb down from the prison building using a bedsheet and then getting over the walls. It wasn’t until 2002 that he was once again apprehended. He was sentenced to 17 years for murder, as well as additional time for his prison escape and other minor crimes. The survival expert was still serving his sentence when he disappeared in March of last year… Read More »

Every year, on January 17, the people of San Bartolome de Pinares, in Spain, celebrate St. Anthony by riding their horses, donkeys and mules through piles of burning tree branches in a celebration called Las Luminarias. The unique tradition of leaping over and through flames dates back 500 years, but the men and women of San Bartolome de Pinares village still celebrate it religiously. They gather all the branches they find in the days leading up to the festivities, and when dusk falls on the eve of Saint Anthony’s, they light them ablaze. Riders lead their mounts through the burning piles of the village, accompanied by sounds of drums and Spanish bagpipes. Read More »