You Deserve Spain Ad Campaign To Encourage Holidaymakers To Return
A three-month Europe-wide campaign has been launched by Spain’s tourist board urging foreign travellers to return, backed by an €8 million investment and social media advertising.
You Deserve Spain is the slogan on different photographs, the most frequently-seen being one of a family standing on a beach looking out over the sea. Instead of the usual bright sunshine, the people in the image are watching a sunrise over the sea. The advert has been pinned everywhere from Piccadilly Circus to German buses. The campaign is mainly targeting its top four European holidaymaker output countries – France, Germany, Italy and the UK – and to a lesser, but still significant, extent, the four main emerging Spanish tourism markets on the continent, Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. The adverts are tailored specifically towards the four main ‘niches’ of visitors – young adults, families, adults without children and the retired population.
Videos and billboards feature people at home ‘pretending’ to be out for a country hike, whilst actually on a treadmill; attempting to cook but without much success and simulating surfing on a board lying on the floor indoors. The picture then changes to these people actually hiking and surfing and, instead of cooking, enjoying local cuisine in restaurants in Spain.
These activities replace the usual scenes of lounging on a beach or by a pool, in a bid to show off a side of Spain that goes beyond mere sun-seeking breaks and to appeal to those who choose their holidays based upon the culture, countryside or cityscape.
The slogan You Deserve Spain means, on a subconscious level, the viewer associates travelling to the country as a ‘reward’ and creates the idea in his or her mind that they need to practice a little self-care after the challenges of the long pandemic year. It talks like a concerned friend telling people to look after themselves and treat themselves, because they have either ‘suffered enough’ or ‘worked hard for it’. The slogan also generates a sense of trustworthiness, quality and safety, in an attempt to get holidaymakers to overcome their reticence of travelling or going abroad’.
Spain’s First-Ever ‘Outpatient’ Stomach Reduction Operation
The young woman was operated on at the beginning of April and was discharged the same day and cared for at home.
The General and Digestive Surgery at the Germans Trias i Pujol Centre in Barcelona – a hospital better known as ‘Can Ruti’ – conducted a vertical robotic gastrectomy on a young woman diagnosed as ‘morbidly obese’.
After returning home, Can Ruti’s ‘home hospital’ service visited her frequently to monitor her progress and control any pain she may have been suffering.
The procedure forms part of Can Ruti’s drive to ‘redefine surgical circuits’ by coordinating with the ‘home hospital’ wing, and is a launch pad for a new approach to operations, according to the centre. It is expected to bring about a paradigm shift which could eventually see surgery waiting lists cut if it takes off nationwide. Even fairly complex operations need not involve admission, as all post-op care will be provided at home, freeing up beds.
Costa Del Sol Company Builds Luxury Homes From Discarded Shipping Containers
Creating a circular economy through upcycling and recycling is becoming a trend in just about every industry and household;
Plastic waste fished from the sea turned into clothing and home textiles. Battered and out-of-date furniture getting a sophisticated new look with chalk paint and varnish.
Companies and individuals are keen to turn ‘rubbish’ and ‘landfill fodder’ into consumer goods. Houses are no exception. A joint venture in Marbella is turning discarded shipping containers into elegant residential homes. Lukas Schween, head of the German family architects business and an estate agent have teamed up to create residential properties that really are ‘off the back of a lorry’ and are environmentally-friendly. Massive amounts of steel containers are disposed of all the time; even if they do not end up in landfill sites, melting them down to reuse the material drinks about eight megawatts/hour of electricity, without even taking into account the emissions. Building a home uses up five of them, which is 17.5 tonnes of steel – an iron alloy that would otherwise involve materials mined from the earth’s ever-diminishing resources.
Excavation is not normally required; no plant or heavy machinery is employed (creating more emissions) and the only transporting of material needed is that of shipping the containers to the site. The building process takes around six months, most of which is carried out off-site, then the parts are set up on the end plot.
The homes are attractive and energy-efficient. You might expect living inside a lorry to be airless and insufferably hot, but it is not like that at all. The container steel creates the structure, frame and walls, but other materials are added, including plenty of glass for natural light. The end result is open and airy.
Named ‘The Astonishing Collection’, these elegant eco-builds are a good size, with 3-4 bedrooms, 1-4 bathrooms and approximately 116-220 square metres.
Greater demand for sustainability; recycling rubble and energy-efficiency,
planet-friendly, sustainable and energy-efficient homes are more in demand than ever by buyers, especially ‘blue-chip property-seekers’ with enough funds available to allow them ample choice.
Conventional home-building is now heavily focused on sustainability and on minimum power consumption needs with quality construction involving damp-proofing and insulation to prevent over-use of heating or air-conditioning. Developers normally have to demonstrate their projects’ energy-efficiency and environmentally-friendly nature before gaining planning permission. Solar panels are more frequently added as a standard part of the structure.
Local councils are now increasingly calling for residential construction and civil engineering companies to watch their carbon footprints and aim for zero waste. In the past demolitions and major structural renovations would create huge amounts of rubble that would simply get dumped on a waste disposal site, whilst new building material would be mined from quarries or obtained by breaking into mountains. These days, building rubble is more likely to be ground down and turned back into construction material, meaning nothing is disposed of and no plundering of natural resources is involved. Last year, three villages in southern Valencia were said to be among the first in Spain to build and resurface roads using recycled rubble. The district hospital in Gandia was moved to a new site in April 2015 and the old structure, condemned as unsafe, was demolished in 2020. All the rubble from the four-storey building was crushed down to be used again for new constructions.