700 Workers. 99% Yes. And Your Padrón Renewal Just Stopped.

You have probably never attended a plenary session at your ayuntamiento — town hall. You may not know where the building is. If you have been on the Costa del Sol for more than a year, you have almost certainly depended on it without thinking about it.

Your padrón — town-hall registration — runs through your ayuntamiento. So does your building permit. Your rubbish collection. Your street lighting. The planning classification of your property. The urbanisation roads your car drives on every morning.

Last Thursday, 700 workers at Mijas Town Hall walked off the job. All five unions. 99% vote. The first major municipal strike in Mijas in recent memory.

The same day, the same town hall approved a plan to take over roads, lighting, drainage, and green spaces for 96 urbanisations across the municipality.

Two decisions. Same building. Opposite directions. That is worth paying attention to.

All five unions representing municipal workers called the strike after more than two years of stalled collective bargaining. Workers cited deteriorating conditions, delays in job stabilisation under the 2022 Public Employment Offer, and a council that responded to court rulings (which declared certain position changes null) by appealing each one rather than negotiating.

This is not a pay dispute. It is a structural one. Spain's 2021 labour reform cut the national temporary employment rate from 29.7% to 12.7% (Confirmed 2024 data). But municipal government is where stabilisation has lagged most. Workers on rolling temporary contracts, experienced instructors replaced, and institutional knowledge walking out the door.

The immediate impact: council services across Mijas were disrupted for a day. Padrón appointments, building queries, and community programmes in La Cala de Mijas and Las Lagunas, all paused. Demonstrations outside Mijas Town Hall at 10:30 and Casa de la Cultura in Las Lagunas at 16:00.

One day. Resolved. Back to normal.

Except it is not resolved. The underlying dispute has not been settled. The negotiations that stalled for two years remain stalled.

Here is the other story from the same day.

If you live in a Mijas urbanisation, you may recognise this: roads with potholes that nobody fixes. Street lighting that goes dark when copper cables get stolen (Mijas has had this problem for over a decade). Drainage that floods in winter because nobody is clearly responsible for maintaining it.

Ninety-six urbanisations across the municipality have been operating in a legal grey area. Classified as consolidated urban land, but with no clear municipal obligation to maintain roads, lighting, drainage, or green spaces. Residents, many of them British homeowners, have been paying the same IBI — property tax — and municipal taxes as everyone else in Mijas. They have not been receiving the same level of services.

The council voted to change that. A new plan places all 96 under full municipal responsibility, in line with Andalucía's LISTA land sustainability law.

The plan follows Andalucía's LISTA land sustainability law and aims to eliminate the two-tier system. Thousands of residents stand to benefit. If it works, urbanisation owners get proper municipal road maintenance, funded street lighting, and access to public grants for infrastructure upgrades. The average IBI in Mijas ranges from €400 to €1,200 per year, depending on the property's value. That tax is supposed to fund these services. For 96 urbanisations, it has not.

That is a genuine improvement. The question is who does the maintenance.

The same workforce that just walked out over understaffing is the workforce that will maintain 96 additional urbanisations. More roads. More lighting. More drainage. More green spaces. All added to a council that could not reach a collective agreement with its existing 700 employees.

This is not unique to Mijas. Every ayuntamiento on the Costa del Sol runs on a version of this model: essential local services delivered by a workforce on temporary contracts, negotiating with councils that respond to disputes by appealing court rulings rather than settling them.

Your town may not have had a strike last Thursday. But the conditions that produced one in Mijas, stalled stabilisation, overextended services, and growing populations exist up and down the Costa. Marbella, Fuengirola, Benalmádena, Estepona. The expat population has grown in every municipality. The town hall headcount has not kept pace.

If you live in one of the 96 Mijas urbanisations, ask your comunidad de propietarios — homeowners' association — about the handover timeline. If your community currently pays for its own road maintenance and lighting, those costs may shift to the council. That affects your community fees. It also means your maintenance quality now depends on the same workforce that just walked out.

If you live elsewhere on the Costa, the pattern is the same. Your padrón renewal, your licencia de obra — building permit, your urbanisation's road surface: these all run through your ayuntamiento. When the workforce is stable and funded, it works quietly. When it is not, services degrade quietly until something breaks publicly.

Municipal services are the infrastructure you notice least when they work and most when they stop.

Your padrón is managed by your town hall. Here is how that process works.

"¿Cuándo es el próximo pleno?" — When is the next plenary session?

Your ayuntamiento's plenary sessions are public. You can attend. Most expats never have.

Your town hall is the most important institution in your daily life on the Costa, and probably the one you think about least. Mijas just showed both sides of the coin in a single day: a workforce stretched to the breaking point and an ambitious plan to fix a decades-old service gap across 96 urbanisations. The plan is welcome. The capacity to deliver it is the open question. Every coastal town runs on the same model. Mijas is just the one that said it out loud.

See you on the paseo — A. and the WaypointSur team, currently checking our urbanisation's street lighting