Over the years, I’ve reported that property developers from Madrid, Valencia and the south coast had begun to pile into ‘unspoilt’ Galicia and that there were, for example, proposals for at least 17 golf courses along our coast. El País has now caught up with this and yesterday had a two page spread on the threat that looms over us. In essence, the developers propose to spend 84 billion euros in order to ‘Marbella-ise’ us by virtually doubling the number of coastal properties over the next decade or so. To be sure, there have long been laws to stop the despoliation of the coast and, all credit to them, the Socialist-Nationalist Xunta has recently strengthened these. However, as the newspaper points out, the money at stake is ten times the regional government’s budget and, in practice, a losing battle is being fought to stop the local councils facilitating its spend via planning permissions of ‘dubious legality’. Given the level of town hall corruption is Spain, this is not terribly surprising but it is profoundly depressing. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that we become the new Mecca not for Spanish but for foreign tourists. The only consolation is they’d be crazy to come outside the summer. So might not. Except for those dumb enough to buy a timeshare for any time other than June to August.

But, hey ho, the EU has announced an Incofish initiative which will allow us to check via our mobiles whether the wee fish we’re being offered in our tapas bars are illegally small or not. As if we needed to. And as if anyone will. A different universe.

The better news is that homesick members of the Galician diaspora and students of Gallego can now access the on-line edition of the Voz de Galicia in both Spanish and Galician. And . . . Se atopas algún erro podes enviarlo a tradutor@lavoz.es - Which you may well have to do as A versión en galego é unha tradución automática.

On a wider front, the new year brought the start of the government’s scheme for helping young people [22-35] to get cheaper rents. The web page and the phone lines immediately collapsed and the forms were, anyway, unavailable. I rather like the comment in one of our local papers – On the very day it came into effect and only shortly after the Minister had pronounced the scheme from on high, the web page and the phone lines collapsed, just like the commuter trains into Barcelona. Two days later she announced new measures to prevent fraudulent claims. So it’s a good job that, as she said, they’d studied things right down to the last detail. Can you imagine what would have happened if they hadn’t?