I mentioned once in a previous column that the growing number of tourists in Spain and the nuisance they cause is causing resentment among locals. Back then it was specifically about the Canary Islands, but last week, part of the population of Malaga, the capital of the Costa del Sol, also took to the streets, inspired by the protests in the Canary Islands and just before the tourist season gets into full swing. This time it was not about the nuisance of drunken Britons or the irritating sound of rolling suitcases clattering against the facades of the narrow streets in the city centre at night, but about a more fundamental problem: housing shortage. Thousands- according to the organising tenants' union, there were 25 000, but the Guardia Civil kept it at 5 500- gathered in the Plaza de la Merced, under the no doubt approving eye of Pablo Picasso, who sits there immortalised in bronze, diagonally across from his birthplace, on a bench, with a head whose bronze shines because many a tourist places himself next to Picasso on the bench for the obligatory photo and then cannot resist the temptation to give him a bulb rub over the head. Incidentally, in the town of El Puerto de SantaMaria in the province of Cadiz, in front of the giant bullfighting arena, there is one such bronze statue of a bull that is 'well hung’' and whose pronounced scrotum also gleams in the sun because ladies -and gentlemen- tourists can’t resist rubbing it. I bet Picasso, as a notorious womaniser, wouldn't mind should that too in time be the fate of the trousers of his popular statue in Malaga.
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