Inside Spain: Valencia's mosquito plague and dictatorship villages
In this week's Inside Spain we look at how Valencia is releasing 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes to deal with an insect plague and how villages named after Spain's dictator Franco are ignoring a law forcing them to change their names.
Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.
Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.
Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly.
🦟 @GVAsanitat insta a evitar los focos de cría de mosquito tigre para impedir su proliferación
➡️ La Conselleria pone en marcha una campaña de concienciación sobre la importancia de frenar la propagación de este insecto, ya que es transmisor de determinadas enfermedades
— GVA Sanitat (@GVAsanitat) June 13, 2024
In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.
Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions.
As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years.
Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).
Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works.
Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it's black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.
Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.
On a completely different note, Spain's Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.
It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.
READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law
One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).
These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few.
In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times.
However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history.
The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.
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Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.
Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.
Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly.
🦟 @GVAsanitat insta a evitar los focos de cría de mosquito tigre para impedir su proliferación
— GVA Sanitat (@GVAsanitat) June 13, 2024
➡️ La Conselleria pone en marcha una campaña de concienciación sobre la importancia de frenar la propagación de este insecto, ya que es transmisor de determinadas enfermedades
In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.
Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions.
As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years.
Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).
Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works.
Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it's black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.
Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.
On a completely different note, Spain's Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.
It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.
READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law
One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).
These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few.
In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times.
However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history.
The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.
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