Business as usual in Badalona as council ignores court order to shut for the bank holiday

The council offices in Badalona are attending to the public and six civil servants are on the job, despite a judge having ordered them yesterday to shut for the October 12 Spain-wide day off.

Whilst the rest of Spain is either kicking itself for not having gone grocery shopping yesterday, or chilling out with a mid-week day off work – or gearing up to watch the military parades in Madrid presided by King Juan Carlos and Queen Letizia – it is business as usual in Badalona, where public authorities do not consider October 12 anything to celebrate.

“Yesterday [for Tuesday], we considered the verdict to be a coup d'état against municipal sovereignty, so we've decided to open,” says the mayor's third assistant José Téllez, who then tore up the copy of the judge's verdict.

October 12 is a national holiday to mark 'Hispanic Day', or the anniversary of Christopher Columbus' having discovered the Americas and his docking in what is now Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.

Increasingly, in the last couple of years with the rise of a younger, more left-wing political movement, more and more officials and residents are starting to question the ethics of a 'national celebration' of the start of the violent and devastating colonisation of much of the American continent – even though large swathes of former Spanish-owned territories have been free from the empire's shackles for over 200 years.

Last year, national authorities declared October 12 to be 'Spain National Day', in celebration of all things Spanish and all the people living in and supporting the country, irrespective of nationality.

But the origins of the public holiday's being on the anniversary of Columbus' landing mean this has not caught on entirely.