In the biggest crackdown on anti-social behaviour in decades, the city of Madrid is to impose new restrictions and fines on everything from soliciting the services of a prostitute to juggling, dog-feeding and carpet-beating in public.
All manner of human behaviour is being targeted under the new laws, including being careless with pot plants on a balcony or for using a park bench for – perish the thought – “something other than sitting”.
The draft series of regulations, currently being reviewed in all-party discussions, represent the biggest single series of potential changes to the Spanish capital’s civic legislation since the ‘Policing and Good Government law’ of 1948. In equally wide-ranging format, that 1948 law banned everything in Madrid from blasphemy (intriguingly defined in the legislation as ‘particularly forbidden’) to woodchopping in public and keeping poultry. » | Alasdair Fotheringham | Madrid | Wednesday, October 09, 2013
