Toddler dies after being left in car during heatwave, wildfires in Catalonia kill two people, more chaos for train passengers in Spain and other news on Wednesday July 2nd.
Toddler dies after being left in car during heatwave
A two-year-old died in northeast Spain on Tuesday after being left in a car for several hours during a heatwave that has pounded the country.
Emergency services in Valls, in the Tarragona region, were alerted in the early afternoon but were unable to resuscitate the child, a police spokesperson told AFP.
“Everything seems to indicate that it was negligence on the father’s part. The child spent the entire morning in a locked car under the sun,” they added.
“It was heatstroke. Even an adult would have died.”
Temperatures in Valls reached up to 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade on Tuesday morning, according to the national meteorological agency Aemet.
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Wildfires in Catalonia kill two people
Authorities in Spain’s Catalonia region on Tuesday confined about 14,000 people to their homes due to two wildfires that broke out almost simultaneously in the province of Lerida.
In one of the blazes, near the town of Cosco, “two people were found lifeless by firefighters”, the fire and emergency service said in a statement.
The exact cause of the fire was unclear, but the service said the recent heat, dry conditions and strong winds caused by storms had increased the intensity of the flames.
Catalonia regional president Salvador Illa said he was “dismayed after learning of the death of two people as a result of the fire”, in a post on X.
More chaos for train passengers in Spain
Spain’s rail network experienced yet more problems on Monday and Tuesday when 300 passengers on a train between Madrid and Andalusia were left stranded in the middle of nowhere for 14 hours due to a problem on the tracks.
The situation was made even worse by the fact that Spain has been experiencing a punishing heatwave and people had no access to water or proper shade or air-conditioning. More than 21,000 passengers were unable to use Renfe’s services until the problem was resolved.
This is the umpteenth problem Spain’s rail network has experienced over the past year.
READ MORE: Why is Spain’s railway network having so many problems?
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Spain’s Banco Sabadell to sell UK unit to Santander for €3.1 billion
Spanish bank Sabadell, the target of a hostile takeover bid from rival BBVA, on Tuesday said that it was selling its British unit TSB to Santander for €3.1 billion ($3.6 billion).
In a statement, the Catalonia-based bank said that the sale would benefit shareholders, independently of its efforts to repel BBVA’s advances.
Sabadell, Spain’s fourth-largest bank, said two weeks ago that it had received expressions of interest in its British subsidiary, which it has owned since 2015.
Analysts had surmised that the sale was intended to stave off BBVA, whose president Carlos Torres had said it was not an “ideal” moment to undertake such a transaction.
The sale of TSB, which must be approved by Spanish regulators and Sabadell’s own board, would be entirely in cash, with the price fixed at the end of the transaction.
In a separate statement, Santander — Spain’s largest bank — said that the purchase would reinforce its position in Britain by merging TSB into its existing Santander UK unit.
With additional reporting by The Local Spain’s editor Alex Dunham
