Three Pieces of Good News Survived a Week of Checking. Nobody Was Selling Any of Them.

We first ran this on 19 June. You had told us what stopped being hard, and the piece landed on two lines we still believe: "the fragmentation never resolves, it just stops frightening you," and "competence here is not a destination, it is a better set of reflexes for water that never seems to calm down."

This week we went looking for the Friday version of that. Things that quietly got better, so we could hand them to you before the weekend.

Most of it did not survive the checking. The train reinforcement everyone has been describing as ending on 31 August turns out to be a different operator's timetable; the one we wrote about has a September schedule already selling, so there is nothing to hurry for. A feria that looked from the outside like it had passed off calmly had, two days after it closed, the Socialist group at the town hall demanding a debate on what the feria should even be. And a hospital wing we were ready to point oncology readers towards, until we could not establish from any public source what is actually treating patients inside it, so we are not pointing anyone anywhere.

The one train item that did hold up is smaller and duller than the story it replaced: Renfe has extra Avlo services running Tuesdays and Wednesdays to 9 September, from €9, and €5 for children. Duller is rather the theme today.

Two things did survive. They have something in common, and it is the useful part of today.

Carlos Carrera runs the residents' association in Málaga's old centre. He has a court action running against the town hall over tourist flats in residential buildings. He is not a friendly witness on the subject of the city's handling of noise.

Asked how the eight days of feria had gone, he said the mass botellones — mass open-air drinking sessions of previous years "sí están disminuyendo," are genuinely shrinking, and that people living in the centre could "hacer una vida normal," lead a normal life.

He stayed angry about everything else in the same breath. The association, he said, is consulted "absolutamente para nada." So this is not a quiet feria and it is not a settled argument: the National Police logged 126 brawls across the ten-day operation against sixty-six last year, and the debate about what the feria is for is now formally open at the town hall.

But one narrow thing got better on one set of streets, and the man with the most standing to deny it volunteered it instead. That is worth more than any council balance sheet, because he had nothing to gain by saying it.

Here is the second one, and it has been sitting there since 1997.

Decreto 128/1997 establishes free choice of specialist and public hospital across the Andalusian public health system. Not a pilot, not a proposal. Twenty-nine years old. Its first article says that within the public system, and using its own staff and facilities, "es libre la elección de médico especialista y de hospital público."

Four things about how it actually works. It runs through your GP, who has to agree you need specialist care, and your health centre is obliged to hold the information and arrange the first appointment. It covers scheduled care only: programmed consultations, therapeutic procedures, and diagnostic tests your doctor has ordered. Emergencies are not included, and you go to the nearest. Once you choose, you are committed for that episode, and for at least twelve months if the condition is a long-running one. And choosing somewhere further from home does not automatically bring funded transport with it.

Now the part that explains why you may never have heard of this. The regional health department's own citizen-facing summary of the right is narrower than the decree, framing it around surgical intervention. The decree is broader. If you ask at a counter and are told free choice only applies if you are having an operation, that is the summary talking, and the decree is worth asking for by name.

Worth knowing which hospital is yours before you use it. Hospital Costa del Sol covers nine municipalities: Benahavís, Casares, Estepona, Fuengirola, Istán, Manilva, Marbella, Mijas and Ojén, around 437,000 people on the hospital's own end-2022 count. If you live in Benalmádena or Torremolinos it is not your hospital, you sit under the Virgen de la Victoria in Málaga, and libre elección — free choice is the route by which you ask for something different.

Nobody markets this. There is no campaign, no leaflet, no company that makes money when you use it. Which is exactly why it took twenty-nine years to reach you.

The third one is a book, and it belongs in this issue rather than tacked on the end of it.

Paul A.J. Arts is a Mijas-based subscriber, a Dutch artist, and a former dentist. On Tuesday 1 September he publishes his first book, The Bitcoin Robbery.

We have been waiting for this one. Somebody a few towns along the Costa had a large amount of money taken from him inside a system built to make that untraceable, and instead of writing it off he spent years going after it, got far enough to put an English court order in his hand, and then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Most people stop at the first lawyer's estimate. He did not.

Start with the prologue, free and ungated on his site, five minutes well spent whether or not you ever buy the book. A morning at a kitchen island. Coffee, the fridge humming, birds outside, and a balance that reads zero and keeps reading zero on every refresh. The day before, he had gone to the bedroom for the mirror with twenty-four words engraved on it, and typed them into a website. He describes losing more than a million dollars' worth of bitcoin.

Read that part twice. Twenty-four words, engraved on metal precisely so they could never be lost, typed into a form. If you hold any crypto at all, that is the attack, and it does not care how careful you thought you were being.

What he did next is the book: blockchain tracing, lawyers, an English court. He publishes the sealed order himself, dated December 2024, requiring the assets returned or just under two million pounds instead, inside fourteen days. Nobody turned up to contest it. He says nothing has come back.

The cover carries a line from Tuur Demeester, the Belgian analyst who was recommending bitcoin back in 2012 when it traded around five dollars. "A fascinating story. I read the entire manuscript in one sitting. A real rollercoaster from beginning to end."

Our copy is ordered. Start with the prologue, and we will come back to it properly in September once we have read the whole thing. I love a true-life crime story, so this looks perfect for me. Congratulations, Paul.

Libre elección — free choice. The right in Decreto 128/1997. Ask your GP: "¿Puedo ejercer la libre elección de hospital?"

Botellón — an open-air drinking session, usually young, usually loud, usually in a square somebody lives on. The word behind most of Málaga's summer noise arguments.

June said competence here is a set of reflexes rather than a destination, and that still holds. Here is one more reflex to add to the pile, and it is cheap. When something good about this Costa reaches you, ask who benefits from you believing it. This week that test failed a train story, a feria story and a hospital story, and it passed a man suing the town hall, a decree from 1997, and an author who published the ending where he lost.

One more piece of our own homework while we are here. On 27 July we asked you to tell us which pieces you wanted re-checked, and said the second half of the season was yours to fill. We have re-run sixteen of them since, and we picked every single one ourselves. There is one week of the season left. If there is something in the archive you want put back under the light, this is the week to say so.

So, the specific version of June's question. Hit reply with the one piece of Spanish admin you have handled since June without rehearsing it first. Name the errand, not the feeling. One line is plenty. And if you sent the building question we asked yesterday, that reply is still the one we want, this is just the other one.

Enjoy the weekend — A. and the WaypointSur team, cross-examining the good news.