IT was back in October 2007 that we published, perhaps, our most iconic front page.
Row upon row of ancient oak trees stood apparently dead, as far as the eye could see.
Hidden at the back of a giant 2000-home golf macroproject near Ronda, we counted hundreds of specimens, all over 100 years old.
Sacrificed in order to put in the infrastructure for the Los Merinos development that didn’t even have planning permission, we described them as ‘like war graves in the Somme’.
As an expat tree surgeon Kit Hogg told us at the time: “It is disgusting and a cynical and botched attempt to create space for a golf course.
“I am sure very few of these heavily protected trees will survive.”
We were less than a year in business when we stumbled across one of Spain’s worst environmental scandals taking place right under our noses.
While none of the local media groups – including Diario Sur, Ronda Semanal or ABC – were showing any interest, we decided to investigate what was really going on.
Working with green Ecologistas en Accion and Greenpeace we started to probe the project’s history and licences and, above all, who was behind Los Merinos.
Making enemies and losing friends along the way, we established that the developers didn’t have permission to carve up the area, less act like vandals killing ancient trees.
Our hard-hitting October 2007 front page ended up going on banners and t-shirts and galvanised local protest groups to organise a national demonstration, which was attended by thousands of people.
Meanwhile, another front page on Los Merinos – we published nearly a dozen on the scandal over five years – led to three expats being sued by the developers for a total of €21 million.
Later described as ‘mafia tactics’ by a judge who threw out the case, this story was followed up by the UK media (the Independent, Times and Telegraph), which in turn meant Spain’s national media pursued it.
A few years later in October 2011 we published one of the most shocking scandals of our entire 20 years.
Under the headline Crying Shame, we revealed that up to 300,000 babies had been stolen from their mothers during the Franco era.
We ran the story after being given a review copy of a documentary the BBC was about to run on the scandal that week.
In the harrowing case it emerged thousands of mothers were told their babies died in childbirth, while in fact they were taken by nuns and given to ‘more deserving’ families.
Finally in October 2018 we reported how an expat had been hospitalised for over a month after being bitten by a black widow spider on the Costa del Sol.
Aurelia Nesslany was treated at Hospiten, after being bitten by the spider during a game of cards at the Nautical Club in Estepona port.
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