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The Spanish region of Catalonia will hold an election for its regional parliament on September 27, a vote the main parties want to use as a proxy for a referendum on independence opposed by Madrid.

The wealthy Spanish region of Catalonia will hold an election for its regional parliament on September 27, a vote the main parties want to use as a proxy for a referendum on independence opposed by Madrid.
At the beginning of September the BBC’s Hardtalk program interviewed Raül Romeva, the top candidate to the Catalan premiership for the secessionist bloc Junts pel Sí (Together for Yes).

But it wasn’t until a week later that it went viral on Spanish social media after parts of it were uploaded to a YouTube channel run by Dolça Catalunya, a website that compiles anti-secession information.

The video, which weaves together eight different moments from the interview, has been viewed around 675,000 times since then. And a search for “BBC Romeva” on Topsy, a social media analysis website, shows 6,500 tweets in the last week.

In the clips from the program, which specializes in tough, occasionally controversial interviews, the Catalan secessionist candidate is seen admitting that he is Spanish, seems unsure of the name of his party, and laughs at corruption allegations within Catalonia’s ruling party, premier Artur Mas’s CDC. Host Stephen Sackur, a former BBC correspondent in Washington and Brussels, has no problem interrupting Romeva to say things such as “that’s nonsense” or to tell Romeva to drop the “political jargon.”

Here is the full interview:

An article in El Pais today stated that Spanish house prices surged 4.2% in the second quarter of the year compared with the previous three-month period, according to figures released by the National Statistics Institute (INE).

Year-on-year, the recent numbers represent a 4% rise in real estate prices. This is the biggest increase since 2007, right before the beginning of the global economic crisis and the subsequent property crash in Spain.

This significant increase in price tags, comparable only to the days of the real estate bubble, affects both new and existing homes and points to a nationwide housing recovery on the back of improved forecasts for the Spanish economy as a whole.

One of the keys to this expansion was the surge in existing house prices, which rose 4.6% in the second quarter of 2015. New homes appreciated 1.5% from the first quarter.

The property crash sent prices tumbling more than 36%. There was a modest uptick last year, but it varied greatly by region. This time, every Spanish region has recorded price hikes, a fact that is accelerating the pace of expansion.

All of Spain’s regions registered quarterly rises, according to the INE data. The biggest year-on-year price hikes are taking place in areas where the real estate sector is detecting the greatest demand and concentrating its housing starts: the Balearic Islands (7.3%), Catalonia (5.5%), Madrid (6.4%) and Cantabria (5.1%). Prices appreciated the least in Asturias, Extremadura and Galicia, with rises of under one percent.