Inside Spain: 'Not my Virgin' and Booking.com crackdown

It may not be Holy Week in Seville, but the Virgin Mary is the talk of the town currently.

That’s because a restoration of an effigy of their patron Virgin - La Virgen de la Macarena - is not up to the standards of locals, who they say has been excessively beautified or ‘yassified’.

Yassification, for those not in the know (we weren’t either) involves editing someone or something in a photo so that they are almost unrecognisable, with unrealistic beauty features.

To be clear, this isn’t a repeat of the notorious Ecce Homo restoration from a decade ago, where a fresco of Jesus Christ left the Son of God looking like a mix between a monkey and a character from a horror movie.

Some heavier eyeliner yes, a bit more rouge perhaps, more contoured eyebrows even, but to the untrained eye not a botched job that deserves such rampant condemnation.

Then again, who are we to judge? The fervent adoration Sevillanos have for their Macarena is deeply ingrained in their character, and if there has been such a furore over the restoration job perhaps it's for a reason.

You only have to witness locals’ weeping during Semana Santa as her effigy is carried through the streets to understand how important La Virgen is to them.

Seville’s Governing Board of the Macarena Brotherhood has issued a statement apologising to all its members and devotees for any "moral and devotional harm" that may have been caused by the restoration of María Santísima de la Esperanza Macarena, which was meant to improve her image after years of damage caused by candle smoke.

Her original gaze, described as a mix of joy and sorrow, has been brought back, the ‘fake eyelashes’ ditched, the droopy eye lifted. Sevillanos are breathing a sigh of relief.

To an outsider, especially those with Christian beliefs, the events of the past days showcase how different religious devotion can be here, and that Spanish or Andalusian Catholicism very much has its own idiosyncrasies that not all of us can fully understand.

READ ALSO: How devoutly Catholic are Spaniards nowadays?

In other news, online hotel booking giant Booking.com has had to take down more than 4,000 short-term lets in Spain advertised on its website as part of the Spanish government’s crackdown on illegal short-term tourist rentals.

This comes after Spain’s leftist government also ordered Airbnb to take down illegal 66,000 holiday let ads off its platform last May.

For anyone who’s used Booking.com, this comes as no surprise, as nowadays there are just as many if not more private property owners advertising their holiday homes on the site as there are hotels.

For those hoping holiday lets in Spain to disappear as a means of addressing the country’s housing crisis, the clampdown is unlikely to make much of a difference, although it still sends out a message to unlicenced holiday let owners.

The Amsterdam-based platform has said that the 4,093 non-compliant adverts represent "less than two percent" of its 200,000 properties in Spain and that it had always collaborated with the authorities to regulate the short-term rental sector.

Most of them were located in the Canary Islands, one of the regions hardest hit by overtourism and spiralling property prices and rents.

"We're making progress in the fight against a speculative model that expels people from their neighbourhoods and violates the right to a home," far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy wrote on social network Bluesky.

As positive as it may be to know that Spanish authorities are taking the rampant proliferation of tourism apartments a bit more seriously, it’s still a drop in the ocean.

It’s also worth noting that it’s not a black-white matter, there are thousands of people who rely on the revenue they make from their second home to get by in Spain.

If anyone should be targeted, it’s the big corporations that are buying up apartments and turning them into more remunerative Airbnb-style lets, reducing the stock of long-term rental properties and residential properties to buy.

An article in Spain’s Cadena Ser news website recently pointed out that 4 in 10 tourist flats in the country don’t show their licence and that “nothing happens”.

In essence, town halls turn a blind eye because they don’t their neighbours and/or voters to be negatively affected by the clampdown.

"There's no will because they don't want to upset those who work in this field. Spain thrives on tourism, and hotels are no longer able to cope with the dramatic increase in demand in recent years," Alejandro Inurrieta, academic at Madrid’s Complutense University, told Cadena Ser.

However, this could be about to change in the coming days, as on July 1st all short-term and temporary lets in the country have to register with the Spanish government.

We’ll have to wait and see if those who ignore the deadline are punished, or if in the end it'll just be business as usual.

GUIDE: How to register your tourist flat with the Spanish government