A Spanish town’s ban on religious gatherings in sports centers becomes a flashpoint

MADRID (AP): Spain’s government on Friday criticized a ban enacted in a southeastern town that prohibits religious gatherings in public sports centers, a measure that will mainly affect members of the town’s Muslim community who in recent years have used the spaces to celebrate religious holidays.

The ban — approved last week by the conservative local government of Jumilla, a town of 27,000 — has since become a flashpoint. Its critics, including Spain’s leftwing national government, have condemned the measure as discriminatory while some on the right are celebrating it as a means to uphold the nation’s Christian culture.

Spain’s Migration Minister Elma Saiz said on Friday the ban was “shameful,” and urged local leaders to “take a step back” and apologize to local residents.

Saiz told Spain’s Antena 3 broadcaster that the measure is “attacking and harming people, citizens who have been living for decades in our towns, in our cities, in our country, contributing and perfectly integrated without any problems of coexistence.”

The ban is the latest controversy involving Spain’s hot-button issues of immigration and multi-culturalism, following clashes last month in the southern Murcia region between far-right groups and local residents and migrants. They erupted after an elderly resident in the town of Torre-Pacheco was beaten up by assailants believed to be of Moroccan origin, which prompted far-right groups to call for retribution on the area’s large migrant population.

Conservative officials in Jumilla, an agriculture-based economy of rolling vineyards, olive and almond trees, defended the ban on Friday.

The town’s mayor Seve González told Spain’s El País newspaper that the measure did not single out any one group and that her government’s wanted to “promote cultural campaigns that defend our identity.”

The measure was initially proposed by the far-right Vox party and then amended and approved by the center-right Popular Party, to which the mayor belongs. It stipulates that municipal sports facilities — where the town’s Muslim community has held religious celebrations — cannot be used for cultural, social or religious activities unrelated to the city council.

Mohamed El Ghaidouni, secretary of the Union of Islamic Communities of Spain that represents more than 900 Muslim communities in the country, called the ban “institutionalized Islamophobia.”

He criticized the local government’s justification for the motion and its allegation that two main Muslim festivals traditionally celebrated in the sports centers — Eid Al-Fitr, which marks the end of Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and Eid Al-Adha, or “Feast of the Sacrifice” — were “foreign to the town’s identity.”

The ban, he added, “clashes with the institutions of the Spanish state” that protect religious freedom.

Vox’s branch in the Murcia region celebrated it, saying Wednesday on X that “Spain is and always will be a land of Christian roots!”

“We must protect public spaces from practices foreign to our culture and our way of life,” the party’s leader Santiago Abascal wrote Friday, adding that “Spain is not Al Andalus,” referencing the historic name for Islamic Spain.

For centuries, Spain was ruled by Muslims, whose influence is present both in the Spanish language and in many of the country’s most celebrated landmarks, including Granada’s famed Moorish Alhambra Palace. Islamic rule ended in 1492 when the last Arab kingdom in Spain fell to the Catholics.

Right-wing governments elsewhere in Europe have passed measures similar to the ban in Jumilla, striking at the heart of ongoing debates about nationalism and religious pluralism.

Last year in Monfalcone, a large industrial port city in northeastern Italy with a significant Bangladeshi immigrant population, its far-right mayor, Anna Maria Cisint, banned prayers outside of places of worship. The move led to protests involving some 8,000 people. The city’s Muslim community is appealing the ban in a regional court.