THE WAYPOINT SUR
A bit of fresh paint.
The summer audit ends here
For six weeks we have been going back through our own archive, re-reading what we told you months ago and checking whether it still held. Today is the last of those, and regular coverage carries on from here.
The short version is that most of it stood up. What we found was around the edges, and the edges turned out to be the interesting part.
What the checking turned up
The same thing caught us out more than once this summer, and it is worth passing on, because it will catch you out too.
As we found last week, the Junta de Andalucía publishes a citizen-facing summary of your right to choose your specialist and your public hospital, and that summary leans heavily on surgery.
The Decreto 128/1997 — Decree 128/1997 underneath it is broader. It covers scheduled medical and surgical consultations, therapeutic procedures, and diagnostic tests your own doctor has ordered.
Same administration, two documents, two different scopes. If you are ever told at a counter that free choice only applies when you are having an operation, the decree is the thing to ask for by name.
The water piece in August had the same shape. Nitrate belongs to the distribution network that serves your address, not to the town on the envelope, so a municipal average tells you very little about what comes out of your own tap.
That is the pattern in nearly everything we had to correct. Not figures we invented, but a reading of how somebody else had presented their own information, which turned out to be narrower or wider than the document underneath it.
The forward-looking half held up better than we expected. Our promise tracker follows what gets announced on this Costa against what actually turns up.
Across the summer, the things physically under construction kept getting finished, while the things that existed only as an announcement mostly stayed that way. That is a rule of thumb you can apply to the next ribbon-cutting you read about.
What we are bringing you next
One thing went better than we hoped. Enough of you ran your bills through the electricity contract checker for a pattern to show: most of you are on perfectly sensible contracts, and the ones we helped find out they were paying too much are now with better providers.
It has just been given a bigger job. It now takes solar and an electric car into account.
If there are panels on the roof, it will look at what they generated, what went out to the grid, what you were paid for it, and how much of your own electricity you are actually living on. Checked September 2026.
The larger piece of work came out of what we learned handling Navigator cases in the spring and through the summer. What you most often want a hand with is not information. It is the bureaucratic minutiae: renewals, visas, the paperwork that decides whether your autumn is calm or spent on hold.
So we have been building for exactly that, and the first of them is having its last coat of paint.
It takes the permit you hold and the date it runs out, then tells you what you should be doing and by when, instead of leaving you to work out which of four contradictory forum posts applies to you.
It has been going by "the renewal adjudicator", a name only a committee of drunken Scotsmen could love, and we promise it will not be called that by the time it reaches you.
We are also keeping the habit that produced all of this. From October, once a month, we will look back over the previous month, call out what we got wrong, and say why we think we got it wrong. Partly so you can see it. Mostly so we keep getting better at it.
And we will go on doing what we always do with the calendar. When a new law comes into force, when a filing deadline lands, when a rule you have been quietly living under changes underneath you, you will get it here in the week it matters.
Autumn has a few of those in it. They will arrive when they are useful to you rather than stacked up in a list today.
If there is a piece of Spanish paperwork you would hand to a machine tomorrow if one existed, hit reply and name it. That list is what we build next.
Spanish-lite
Libre elección — free choice. The right in Decree 128/1997, and the words to use when you ask your GP for it.
¿De dónde sale ese dato? — Where does that figure come from? Worth asking at any counter where somebody quotes you a rule from memory.
The bottom line
Six weeks of re-reading ourselves turned out to be an education, and the part that matters is what it sets up.
What it bought is a much better grip on where our figures come from, and a set of tools aimed squarely at the parts of living here that cost you a morning: the renewal, the visa, the contract, the bill.
More of them are on the way. We intend to be a good deal more useful to you this autumn than we managed this summer.
Enjoy the weekend — A. and the WaypointSur team, with the paint still drying as we spiff up the place.
